How Arteri is shaping business design training through testing and collaboration
We live in a fast-paced tech world, and many businesses and departments understand the critical advantage of ensuring their teams skills are advancing at the same pace – it's a need, not a nice to have. Online training courses are no longer novel, but the market has become somewhat saturated with them, at times by subpar learning experiences that leave the learner wondering what they’ve paid for.
Arteri takes a unique approach to business design, meaning our methods align with our ethos to bridge the gap between design, strategy and delivery.
We are passionate about training in the design space, and we have dedicated ourselves to educating our contemporaries with the skills they need to create better business design. We are still on a journey, but we have already learned some important lessons in the process.
Here are the key points we have learned thus far (we will continue to grow and learn):
User testing helps us identify our own biases and blind spots
It is worth failing fast
Collaborative approaches always win
We are listening to you through feedback
Before we implement any project, either for ourselves or for our clients, we believe in extensive and robust user testing. User testing is your most powerful tool for receiving honest, targeted feedback from your intended audience. By conducting pilot tests for our training with a select group of users, we’ve gained invaluable insights into how well our courses resonate. This feedback helps us identify areas that need improvement, clarify confusing concepts, and ensure that we are delivering the intended learning outcomes.
Interestingly, user testing has also exposed areas for improvement beyond the course itself. We're discovering key language that resonates with our users and will boost our marketing efforts, such as course descriptions or promotional materials, so we are more effectively communicating the value of our training.
Fail fast and know when to cut your losses
During our extensive planning for creating our courses, we brainstormed tonnes of ideas on how we could deliver a dynamic training experience to a wide audience. Many of those ideas have stuck fast – mainly around the core concepts of business design and tools to facilitate it.
As we’ve progressed, it became obvious that some otherwise fantastic ideas were just not working for our users. It isn’t easy to let go of an idea you are convinced is good, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it isn’t. But the longer you dwell and procrastinate, the more time you have wasted when you could have spent it learning and improving your service.
Anecdotally, if we spent 3 days going back and forth as a team on the value of a specific piece of software we love for its features, but that our test group is telling us is impeding their progress, we may have wasted approximately double the amount of time it would take for us to research a new app or program that will deliver better results.
So don’t waste time; have faith that the people you’ve chosen for your trial group have something valuable to say. Fail fast and move on.
The importance of collaboration and feedback in business design
Ultimately, the insights gathered through user testing underscore the importance and relevance of codesign in creating better business training courses. User testing is embracing a collaborative approach that involves actively engaging stakeholders, including learners and subject matter experts, throughout the design process. Meaning we will create courses that are more closely aligned with the needs and expectations of our target audience.
Come on this journey with us
So here we are, going full-steam ahead. This is our journey to create meaningful and practical professional development resources. We are happy to discuss tailored training packages that you can purchase prior to the end of the financial year for use in the 2024/25 financial year. You can contact us through our training page to book a consultation with our Lead Trainer, Fran Mether.