Design
Kanban Workbook
Emily worked with Brendan Wovchko of HUGEio to create an all-new, visual workbook as a workshop companion piece.
Design Lead
Emily Mills
Client
The problem:
Students in the half-day “Starting Kanban” workshop received a bound booklet of the workshop slides with lines to take their own notes. While conducting the workshop, Brendan noticed students either took no notes in an effort to be present, or too many notes in an effort to try to remember it all. Some slides were also not included in the workbook, and students got confused about where they were and were distracting with page-flipping. Brendan wanted a happy medium where students could feel engaged with the workshop and not stressed about taking notes.
The solution:
Brendan and I developed a new workbook to guide students through the content, helping them focus on learning the material instead of writing exhaustive notes. The workbook used fill the the blanks, quotes, illustrations, storytelling, exercises, and themes to bring it all together.
Old Workbook
Process
How we did it:
Emily met with Brendan for a 3-hour consulting session equiped with markers, flipcharts, and whiteboards. During this time we re-structured the workshop contents together, coming up with new section titles and subtitles, fill-in-the-blanks, quotes, examples, and illustrations.
Once the meeting was over, Brendan revised the workshop slides to match the new format and sent them to Emily to build the workbook to match the presentation order.
Results
The workbook went through about 10 iterations of revisions and testing with real students before we arrived at a version ready to be sent out to other Kanban trainers.
Hundreds of students have now gone through the program with the new workbook. Brendan notices the students are more present and engaged, and there’s a lot less “where are we again?” page-flipping during the workshop. Hugeio was handed a complete working file package, enabling them to iterate and revise in the future as needed.