Manifest Digital Human Experience Society

My name is Jim Jacoby, and I founded Manifest ten years ago.

Since then, many changes have transformed the business landscape. Digital agencies like Manifest have striven to make sense of the rise of social media, the reinvention of mobile, and computing in the cloud. Nearly every company has felt the impact of ongoing globalization and the credit crunch.

But perhaps the most important shift, from Manifest’s perspective, has been the maturation of user experience design as a business tool. It’s a trend with which the company was intimately involved and, in our view, is far from complete.

UX design was part of the mix of services Manifest offered from the start in 2001. At the time, UX and related concepts like human-computer interaction studies were still primarily an academic discipline.

In the beginning, one of the primary questions being asked was: What does it mean for a human to interact with a computer or machine? That question led to psychological explorations of way-finding and other mental processes that were highly useful, as well as anthropological research into how humans use tools, things like that. But none of that knowledge was being put into practice.

It was about halfway through Manifest’s evolution as a company that user experience became the agency’s primary differentiator in the marketplace. But while we were fascinated with the ideas of UX thinkers, our growing emphasis on the discipline was not primarily an effort to test those theories.

Instead, it was a solution to business problems—an area in which UX proved surprisingly useful.

For Manifest, UX became a toolset that ensured we could predictably and efficiently deliver for our clients.

We watched a lot of our peer organizations become fascinated by the glossy idea, the big campaign, whatever the case may be. Where they stumbled, though, was on the ability to follow through.

To us, UX is a language that we can use to speak to many different audiences at the same time. With UX, we can speak to technology people, we can speak to marketers… we can even speak to consumers. Because we have this common language that we all inherently understand.

That’s one of the many reasons I am so proud that Manifest is celebrating its tenth anniversary.

Another is all the wonderful people I’ve had the chance to work with along the way. Sure, you helped Manifest create great user experiences… but more importantly, you helped us create great human experiences.

So to all of our friends, clients, colleagues and associates, I’d like to say thanks…

Thanks for being a part of this amazing journey. Thanks for helping us create this fascinating new language.

Let’s keep the conversation going!

- Jim