 In this video, I want to share with you some of the most important lessons I learned from co-creating an online course working completely remotely. That's what's coming up in this video. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that are good for people and business. If this is a little bit different video, then you'll probably use it on this channel because it's not about service design per se, although I think there are a lot of lessons for any service design them, but it's much more about the insights that I got from co-creating an online course working completely remotely. By the way, if this is your first time here on this channel, welcome and consider subscribing as we bring new videos that help to level up your service design skills at least once a week. So before we dive into the lessons, I'll give you a little bit of background about this course because this is the second course I released was about at the end of 2018 and it's a course on journey mapping, customer journey mapping and it's a course designed to help people create better maps faster. And that's the idea for that course started way before that when I was interviewing Daniel Yewerman as a guest on the show and Daniel was back then working, he was a CEO of Transmortar Design, one of the leading Scandinavian service design agencies and at that time Daniel was also working on an online tool called Costalence, which is basically the way I described it back then. It's like a Google Docs for customer journey mapping and anyone that has created journey maps know that as soon as you start to sort of get into more advanced stuff, as soon as you go beyond the postage and you try to digitize stuff, you try to collaborate with people outside of a workshop, you run into all sorts of challenges that nobody has really solved in a good way. And I saw that Costalence might be a tool that could really aid help anyone who is really serious about journey mapping and wants to take it to the next level, that it could help to make the process much more efficient and be much more impactful. So Daniel and I continued talking about this and at some point we realized that a lot of people before they can start using a tool like Costalence or when they start using a tool like Costalence, they also actually need to understand what it means to create a good journey map and that knowledge was sort of lacking in a lot of cases, still people were not getting the most value out of their times and efforts that they put into customer journey mapping. So we decided to combine our knowledge and create a course that I think is currently the most helpful course on journey mapping because we've combined I think the experience from over doing 200 projects on journey mapping and all the mistakes we made and we combined that into a compact course. Now let me give you a little bit of background about, well not the background, let me give you the most important learnings that we learned through this process. So like I said, this is a second course that I launched, the first course I created all by myself and that's a course on selling service design with confidence, you can also check out the course down below in the show notes if you're interested in that but this was the second course and this course was unique in the way that it was co-created fully with Daniel and one of the first things that we learned really quickly is that you have to spend a good amount of time defining who you're creating the course for, it makes a lot of sense and that also applies when you're creating a course by yourself but when you're doing something together and you have to work collaboratively, Daniel was all the time in Stockholm, I was back here in Utrecht and we were working through Google Docs, Trello video calls, we quickly realized that we needed to spend quite a fair amount of time in actually really carefully describing who is it that we're targeting with the course, who is the ideal student because we quickly started a topic like journey mapping, you can do a lot of stuff, the danger of sharing too much, wanting to teach too much is immediately around the corner, the first time we brainstormed about some of the topics we could be teaching like the list was never ending, was huge list and then we started to compile like I don't know, you can call it a persona, you can call it a customer avatar, whatever you want to call it, we started to define the profile of our ideal student and we went and validated sort of our assumptions about that ideal student through a series of webinars so we hosted a few webinars about journey mapping and we asked the people who were in those webinars, what are the things you really struggle with, what would you like to learn about and based on that feedback, we narrowed down our ideal student even further and this document, this customer avatar was super, super, super important later on in the project because we went back to this document a lot of the time to think about when we needed to decide if we wanted to include something or not, this was sort of our compass, this was our guiding, guiding line northern star that we could decide are we going to include this or not, so maybe this wasn't even about what should we include in the course, it was much rather this shouldn't be in the course because so the first big lesson always know who you're designing for but especially when you're doing it remotely and with two people spend a good a fair amount of time up front in the beginning thinking about understanding your ideal student and validating that that helped that saved us so much time in the end so that's the first big lesson the second thing we learned pretty quickly is that we have to be mindful about the lecture format, the course format that we were going to choose now my previous course it was me talking and using slides and yeah explaining what is in the lesson, explaining the lesson in really short bite-sized videos but we could have gone for that style here as well so like Daniel could do a lesson, I could do a lesson and then basically separate each other but we felt that that wouldn't add the most value as we really tried to create a course where we were not only teaching the process of creating a good journey map but we were also really concerned about sharing our mindset sharing our deliberations and helping people to understand how to make decisions through the process so not just showing the steps so we had to figure out okay we have two people how are we going to create a format that is engaging and fucked to watch but also educational so we went up there in for much more conversational style of lessons where I took the role of being like the client or the person who wants to create a journey map in my organization and Daniel was like the mentor, the coach, the external consultant who was guiding me through that process and we were, that format allowed us a lot of room to actually have those conversations but also be, use our strengths like I was asking the tough questions because I was the client that could be critical and Daniel was could be in the role of the expert and really explain it in detail why I needed to do stuff how I needed to do stuff so I think that in the end combined really well into a format that is hopefully fun to watch as well so that's the second lesson that we really learned think about if you're going to co-create a course how are the two or more persons going to interact with each other and how is that going to create value for the students in the course now the third lesson relates to the previous one and this one is about that that you don't need to script everything out actually you shouldn't script everything out in the course in the lessons in my in the previous course in the selling services down with confidence course I literally had scripted every word that I was going to say in a lesson and the reason why I did it back there was that I really wanted to keep the videos short compact and like every non-essential word was stripped out of the the script in this course we wanted like I said to have a much more conversational style and when we tried to script it we became like human robots although I'll test authenticity went away and that didn't provide the learning experience that we were looking for so eventually we ended up with just highlighting in bullets the key takeaways that we wanted to share in a lesson and we just started a conversation about those and knowing that if we just have the conversation we will be able to explain those key takeaways anyway so that required some improvisation and thinking on your feet while we were doing that but I think in the end it created for a much more natural and much more interesting format to watch so the second lesson we learned when co-creating a course like we did here is don't script out anything just know the key takeaways and then trust your instinct trust that your experience will allow you to say the right things at the right time and I think it worked well it worked out pretty well in in this format lesson number four that we learned and that might surprise you is that the tech part the technology part isn't actually that hard to achieve especially we had some minor issues to actually do the recordings the course recordings when we got to that point but they were pretty quickly sorted out and the trick that we use was both of us were recording locally the video and we were having a Skype conversation but we are both recording locally and then we would in post production sync the videos to have the best audio and video quality yeah and that worked out pretty well the internet didn't play a big role in this we use some additional tools like screen flick to do what when we were doing screen recordings when we needed to show things and costal performance and and that's that's a really good tool that you can also find down below in the show notes but basically that was it the tech was quite easy that maybe the most important part regarding tech is make sure you have similar quality stuff like similar quality camera similar quality microphone that just makes for a much more consistent experience for the students but but that just means buying the same equipment that doesn't have to be a large investment and I think if I had to think about tech that would be my biggest tip make sure you have the similar tech equipment and the recording part well that just works nowadays it's not that hard lesson number five the final is I think maybe the most important one and the thing that we underestimated the most upfront at least I did and that is actually finding the time to do to create this because it took us about nine months between the moment that we thought okay let's do this till the moment that we made the course public and that that primarily was caused by the fact that we just had to do it in between or next to the things we are already doing on a day we were both running a company so the amount of time that you can put into it is limited so you'll have to juggle all the time with agendas and you it's almost impossible to block a few days to actually sit down and do the course and even if you would be able to sit down for a few days to do the course the we found that the amount of energy you have and actually doing their recording sitting in front of the camera thinking about it is like the two hours recording of lessons is like the max I would say even 90 minutes on hour is ideal after that your energy levels drop so much that the quality of what you're going to share is also going down and that's not what you want so we needed to work in small snippets of time logs and if you spread those snippets out over multiple days then you know that the time it takes to actually get to the next stage starts to count which is not a bad thing per se I don't know if there would be a better way to actually do it maybe to block time up front like every day for one and a half hour but I think this was the the best we could do and that's for me the biggest learning if I would have to do another co-created course again which I'm definitely thinking about it would be to have a more rigid production schedule knowing that the keeping in mind the energy and also that you need to do other stuff besides this so if you're curious about the results how the course eventually ended up and you want to create better customer journey maps faster and with more confidence you can find the course over here if this is your first time here on this channel don't forget to subscribe because we bring more videos that help to level up your service design skills at least once a week thanks so much for watching I look forward to see you in the next video