My name is Marie Kronholm and I work at Försäkringskassan. In the team where I work we make sure that all the services provided online are pleasant to use for all of our users.

Our whole team is a group of people interested in learning new things and when a good friend of mine recommended Mårten’s sketching seminar I instantly felt that it could be a match with the work we carry out in our department.

For me personally, visualizing my ideas have always been a big challenge. After having asked around it was clear that I wasn’t just me. It turned out that many of my colleagues felt the same way. To instantly be able to share ideas using just paper and pen makes perfect sense, it’s just not a skill that people tend to use very often.

Since this was our first meeting with Mårten we didn’t really know what he had in store for us. All I remember was that many of us were excited to see how effective this new technique would be for the type of work that we do.

Mårten kick started his seminar by introducing us to some fundamental sketching techniques. You can only imagine what starts to happen when a room full of professionals starts drawing lines and circles for the first time in their professional career. We drew arrows, boxes, buttons and added shadows to them. Before we knew it we were fully engaged in creating web pages.

In this picture one of the participants is creating quick drafts of his ideas before moving on to more detailed sketches.

I was amazed how fast we were able to improve our newly discovered sketching skills. Not only was it fun but it felt like we had just got started with something that could make our department much more effective. I remember someone bursting “This method is genius in its simplicity!”.

Throughout the seminar Mårten challenged us to view our work from a new perspective and by doing so notice details that otherwise probably would have passed us unnoticed. He also initiated interesting exercises that instantly made us show off what we had just learned. In the end of the seminar we started to sketch a complete concept. Drawing together in this way was effective and also great fun. It makes me interested to see what might be gained by applying it more widely within our organization.

A lot of good looking designs where produced during the day.

As a whole we found the seminar being time very well spent and a great investment in our work processes. We now look forward to Mårten’s second and more advance seminar which is a two-day boot camp. Here we hope to gain even more knowledge and experience, as well as practice what we have learned in our real projects.

If I would recommend Mårten to someone else? Definitely!