Effortmark: better forms and surveys for 20 years

Effortmark's 20th birthday cake
Effortmark’s 20th birthday cake

Is it really 20 years since I set up Effortmark? 1994 seems both a long time ago, and very recent.

Cartoon of Caroline wearing crown and sash reading 'Queen of Forms'
Thanks to Elvia Vasconcelos for this fun sketch

Some things have changed: these days, we talk about ‘design thinking’, ‘service design’, ‘user experience’. Then, it was ‘customer focus’, ‘business process engineering’ and ‘human-computer interaction’.

But some things definitely haven’t: my work then and now is about focusing on people, on what computers are for rather than how they work, and most of all on betterĀ forms and surveys.