Workshoppers of the world
Three weeks ago, myself and Jessica went to Israel. It was a wonderful trip, filled with wonderful food. I took lots of pictures if you don’t believe me.
But it wasn’t a holiday. Before I could go off exploring Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I had work to do. I was one of the speakers at the UXI Studio event.
We arrived on Saturday, and I was giving a talk on Sunday evening. At first I thought that was a strange time for a series of talks, ‘till I realised that of course Sunday is just a regular work day like any other.
It was a lot of fun. I was the last of four speakers—all of whom were great—and the audience of about 200 people were really receptive and encouraging. I had fun. They had fun. Everything was just dandy.
Two days later, I gave a full-day workshop on responsive design. That was less than dandy.
I’ve run workshops like this quite a few times, and it has always gone really well, with lots of great discussions and reactions from attendees. The workshop is normally run with anywhere between ten and thirty people. This time, though, there were about 100 people.
Now, I knew in advance that there would be this many people, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to get as hands-on as I’d normally do; going from group to group, chatting and offering advice—it would simply take too long to that. So I still ran the exercises I’d normally do, but there was a lot more of me talking and answering questions.
I thought that was working out quite well—there were plenty of questions, and I was more than happy to answer as many as I could. In retrospect though, it may have been the same few people asking multiple questions. That might not have been the best experience for the people staying quiet.
Sure enough, when the feedback surveys came back, there were some scathing remarks. Now, to be fair, only 31 of the 100 attendees filled out the feedback form at all, and of those, 15 left specific remarks, some of which were quite positive. So I could theoretically reassure myself that only 10% of the attendees had a bad time, but I’m going to assume it was a fairly representative sample.
I could try to blame the failure of my workshop on the sheer size of it, but I did a variation of the same workshop for about the same number of attendees at UX Week last year, and that went pretty great. So I’m not sure exactly what went wrong this time. Maybe I wasn’t communicating as clearly as I hoped, or maybe the attendees had very different expectations about what the workshop would be about. Or maybe it just works better as a half-day workshop (like at UX Week and UX London) than a full day.
Anyway, I’m going to take it as a learning experience. I think from now on, I’m going to keep workshop numbers to a managable level: I think around thirty attendees is a reasonable limit.
I’m about to head over to Munich for three solid days of workshopping and front-end consulting at a fairly large company. Initially there was talk of having about 100 people at the workshop, but given my recent experience in Tel Aviv, I baulked at that. So instead, the compromise we reached was that I’d give a talk to 100 people tomorrow morning, but that the afternoon’s workshop would be limited to about 30 people. Then there’ll be two days of hacking with an even smaller number.
This won’t be the first time I’ve done three solid days of intensive workshopping, but last time I was doing it together with Aaron:
I’m in Madison, Wisconsin where myself and Aaron are wrapping up three days of workshopping with Shopbop. It’s all going swimmingly.
This last of the three days is being spent sketching, planning and hacking some stuff together based on all the things that Aaron and I have been talking about for the first two days: progressive enhancement, responsive design, HTML5, JavaScript, ARIA …all the good stuff that Aaron packed into Adaptive Web Design.
This time I’m on my own. Wish me luck!