We asked the 17 participants to report a few of their web related talents to help form the workgroups. Basically everyone knew HTML and a healthy portion know some or all of the common web programming languages. What was surprising even shocking, was that except for two participants no one was really from our target audience of "designers." Our definition of designers quickly changed from those whose formal job is design, primarily visual or interface design, to those who implement web sites. As Jacob Nielsen pointed out in a later session during the conference, soon we will have 10's of millions of web sites, from that, and knowing the limited resource of formally trained or experienced interface designers, basically "all" web site will be designed by non-designers.

Once we recognized that none of our participants were schooled in design methodologies we spent more time discussing the design process to be followed throughout the day. This contributed to slowing down the workshop so that we only addressed two instead of four design problems. The workshop was set up to be flexible and this was one of those times to be flexible.