I had two mission statements:

1. “Give the user what they need, not what they ask for.” Discovery is the most important part of the process. You have to determine what the goal is and focus on that. Users shouldn’t have to be concerned with HOW it works, just that it works.

2. “My job is to make your job easier, faster and more efficient.” It’s amazing how much you can learn by walking around. I can’t think of how many times I’d watch someone working in Excel or another application and realize that the process could be made so much easier.

The key is not to say, “You idiot, don’t you know….?” It’s to say, “Let’s try this to see if it doesn’t work better.”

I figured out a way to upload budget figures that used to be keyed in manually, was prone to data entry errors and had to be distributed to departments for proofing and final approval. By moving paper forms to spreadsheets, the math was correct, the entries were standardized and the manual key punching and secondary proofing were eliminated. It cut two weeks off the whole process and eventually helped eliminate a data entry position.

It’s just a matter of looking at processes to discover a better way that the user may not think of. If I was to have a third mission statement, it would be “laziness is the mother of invention.”