Hundred-year Mission

In this UPA interview, Jared Spool talks about his vision for UIE:

"Our goal is to completely eliminate frustration with technology. We see that as a hundred-year mission. I’m building a company that’s going to be around long after I’m gone."

That is so compelling, and it's uttered with complete clarity and confidence. (Jared should be on Oprah.)

I think we have a similar sensibility about what we do at nForm, but not always that sense of purpose. In fact, we still wrestle with where exactly we're going to live in that triangle of tactical services (like usability and design), strategic consulting, and product development.

That tension is reflected in our tagline. Our initial tagline was "Beyond Usability" (seen here) which played to the growing usability-awareness of our local market. We dropped that in favour of "User Experience"--simple, to the point and baffling to most people outside the web world.

My best attempt at a tagline/slogan was this:

Changing the world one screen at a time.

It gets at the transformative side of our practice, but it's still about, well, screens. And that's only one part of our business (people hire us more for discovery and strategy, I think, than wireframes and interaction flows). But I still wish I had a hundred-year mission.