Critiq Workshop — What we learned

The nice attendees* of the second Critiq Designer meet-up (write-up available here) undertook a workshop to help us answer the big question:

How can Critiq attendees and speakers interact before and after the events.

*Nice attendees meaning that everyone who attended was nice, not meaning that only the nice people partook in the workshop!

Rolling back a week, we had planned to deliver a workshop to help us create the brief for the Critiq website. However, after some thought, particularly around this month’s subject of getting a a good brief, we stepped back, and asked ourselves, is it even a website that we need?! Let’s investigate what the users want.

We split into and small groups and worked through some specific areas:

Each group generate ideas around — What do YOU want from Critiq, and what are the benefits of Critiq as an attendee / speaker?

The attendee wants and benefits were listed as follows:

Personal growth
Improve skills
Learn new, better working processes
Network
Get noticed
Inspiration
Stay up to date with current trends
Collaborate
Work with developers more

And the speaker wants and benefits were listed as follows:

Raise personal / business profile
Meet potential new hires
Advertise yourself
Acheive thought-leader status
Getting to know people beyond ‘work face value’
Networking
Peer review
Make new friends
Public speaking experience
Collaboration

This was really interesting. Attendees want to improve their work / workflow, be that with inspiration, trends, processes and by collaboration. Whilst the speaker benefits encompassed business growth as well as being part of the community and collaborating.

[As a side note, working with developers’ as an answer has provoked some interesting ideas around collaborating designer events with developer events — watch this space!]

Each group create a persona of a potential attendee.

Personas were created and specific qualities of each person type were listed and afterwards explored.

A couple of personas created included:

Design Student, 21 years old, Female.
Goals included; Getting a first and finding out what options are available in industry. Challenges included; Not being aware of any network events outside of uni, is nervous about going to professional meet-ups and getting a full time design job after uni.

Junior Designer, 25 year old, Male
Goals included; Honest feedback, find out about opportunities, guidance on directional change, learning skills that can be utilised day-to-day.
Challenges included; Lack of honest and qualified feedback.

Some really good information here, and these personas were a great tool for helping us to create empathy for some of our user groups, knowing their background, challenges and aspirations are key to being able to deliver something relevant and of significant value.

Create a list of features/tools that would help interactions before and after the events.

A list of some of the tools that were listed is here:

Social Media Integration
Slack Channel
Virtual Critique
Instagram Critique
Twitter #
Classic Forum
LinkedIn Links
Sub-Redit
Webpage (splash)
Presentations of past talks
Medium Write-up of past talks (great idea!)

Afterwards, we took what we had learned in the workshop, and looked at the offerings of the listed tools, and organised the user’s needs into three sections:

Must have
Private invite only group (so not to be at the mercy of spammers)
Forum style chatting
One-to-one messaging
Upload imagery / content

Nice to have
Ingternal search
Administrative privileges
Stats, info on members

Future
Booking a one-to-one meeting
Integrate events
Work in progress (for feedback)

In summary, we learned a great deal during this event. From this workshop and future studies, we will be able to design something that is helpful, relevant and will give the community some great tools to enhance their experience in the design industry.

We’re still looking for a few answers and have developed a (really short) survey, so if you wouldn’t mind…