I recently attended an event on social media and application design. I got into a conversation with another attendee and asked him what he did for a living. He paused and then answered “I help good companies let others know how good they really are”.
It was an odd answer, so I asked more: “How do you do that?”. He then went on to explain how he developed web sites, wrote content, optimized SEO, and did the whole social media thing. It sounded like all of the mechanical things that so many other consultants and agencies say they do. But his initial description intrigued me because his description gave me his purpose for what he did, the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what and how’.
It started me thinking about Catalyst Resources and the way that we describe what we do. Sure we design Rich Internet Applications and efficient, aesthetic interfaces. We even refine this further by specifying our focus on mission critical applications and modular, reusable UI. But this ‘what and how’ is not the motivator that actually makes us wake up every morning and go to work. It is not the ‘why’ we do what we do. It is not the essence of our DNA as a company.
Why we do what we do at Catalyst Resources is because we believe that we can fundamentally improve the efficiency and the “pleasurability” of any business activity. The ‘what and how’ is by optimizing business processes, streamlining workflows, creating user-validated, high-performance, modular user interfaces and designing beautiful, intuitive and streamlined Rich Internet Applications.
When I am brought in on a new project I don’t immediately start thinking about what I am going to do from a UI or an application design perspective. I think “what does this company need in order to be more successful”. Coming up with this takes a lot more work and a lot more creativity then coming up with a well-designed set of UI elements. But it is this goal that is the real inspiration behind every project that Catalyst undertakes.
Maybe we need to come up with a tag line: Catalyst Resources - we make the world better, one application at a time. Kind of has a nice ring.
Categories: RIA, User Experience