Workshop A La RaeMag

Last night, as the temperature dipped just low enough to see our breaths, we held the first ever RaeMag Guitar Workshop in Toronto. Our fearless and patient beta testers came out in their numbers to endure a lengthy screencast, my puny explanations and Mike’s unsavory visuals for just under 4 hours. We laughed, we cried, some of us cried more and in the end it was an amazing exploration of what’s possible when you encourage people to create and learn. While our testers clicked, picked, strummed and barred, we learned a few things ourselves.

1. Sometimes, kids are smarter and more profound than you.
2. “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature”! Was shouted by Eric a few too many times.
3. IE once again, managed to decelerate an entire evening.

Although we spend 90% of our time thinking about our users and attempting to predict their every interaction with the site, it’ s easy to get caught on the designer/developer side of the line, detached from them and their point of view. This workshop was an amazing way to get connected and rethink the way we approach further development of the application and had nothing to do with an ulterior motive to get together and jam/hang with some of the coolest testers ever!