FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

This is the second masterclass we’ve run with the University of Ulster, and just like last time we were really inspired by the energy and enthusiasm the students bring to their work.

Last year we had the pleasure to speak with people like Lee Munroe, Paddy Donnelly, Kyle Boyd, and their feedback helped us to develop this years (even better) full-day workshop.

What We Covered

The day broke down into 4 main chunks, with each chunk made up of some presentation & discussion, followed by a practical workshop.

Paul McKeever talked about creating competitive advantage using the web, and about having genuine, valuable conversations with customers. This part of the day was designed to give the students insight into how the web is fundamentally different to broadcast media, and how the web is rapidly changing to become a web of conversations, people and data.

Patsy Lagan talked about delighting clients by getting things done, and how to avoid common pitfalls through better planning, estimating and control. Patsy has deep experience managing creative teams and delivering web and software projects, so this part of the day was meant to show the students how they can mitigate risk and keep clients smiling.

Paul May, never a man to waste a good fruit metaphor, talked about how we scope and research projects, design great services, and put together requirements that are detailed enough to get started. We’ve learned, through bitter experience, that any online service, website, application needs to meet a core set of needs for a limited set of users. Paul talked about identifying and investigating those needs so that what we design is useful, satisfying.

The day ended with a talk and workshop on User-centred Design with Jamie Neely. His session covered the basics of information architecture and using an iterative wireframing process to bring conversations together.

Thanks to Everyone

It is just incredibly encouraging to see the wealth of talent at UU; the students’ questions were challenging, and even today we know there’s ways in which we can improve the workshops. We hope they enjoyed the day - based on the feedback we’ve gotten so far they found it useful. Again, we’d like to thank Chris Murphy and Nicklas Persson  who asked us to talk, they do an incredible job for the creative community here in Ireland.

From the MA we met Eva Hanausek, Joe McStravick, Liam Moore,  Gary Quinn. We also met prospective MA students on the IMD course Brian Burns, Jonathan Campbell, Chris Colhoun, Chris Fearon, David Hughes, Kirstie Scott-Brown, Caroline Smith and Danny Turley.

Video Clips from the Day

We shot some video of the day (so we can laugh at ourselves later). These clips are available on Vimeo, and we’ll embed them here once they’re uploaded.