Vision & Mission

We just celebrated our 6-month milestone here at Steel City UX Ladies and we answered the big question we were all wondering when we launched in June 2020 — does this group fill a void in our UX community? The overwhelming evidence points to all things ‘yes’ as we look at our engagement channels, participation, and member sign-ups! Whew, we’re glad we cleared that hurdle. So, what’s next?

Our organizers have been the catalyst for growing and evolving our group over the past several months, and we’re asking each other a new question — what is our purpose? That’s when we decided to lean into some good old fashioned design-thinking to help pave the way to defining our vision and mission. Check out our process…

First we needed to capture the voice of our members, so we sent out a short survey to understand backgrounds, interests, communication platforms, etc. We learned some new things, and presented out our findings to our organizers for further discussion and consideration.

Then we started looking into how to define a vision and mission — there’s a ton of content out there, but we decided to keep things super simple. Here’s what we learned….

The vision is typically listed first — this statement describes the purpose of the organization, but focuses on goals and aspirations (the desired future position). We decided to boil this down into a simple little formula.

vision statement = [purpose] + [user] + [aspiration]

Example from Amazon: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online… at the lowest possible prices”

The mission is typically listed second — this statement defines the purpose of the organization, it’s objectives, and it’s approach to meet those objectives.

mission statement = [purpose] + [user] + [objective]

Example from Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”

In order to start the dialogue within our organizer group, we reviewed the information above and then we crowdsourced (via a bunch of digital post-it notes in MIRO board) each organizer’s perspective on our purpose, aspirations, tactics, and measures. And just as UX designers do, we synthesized the data and started to put pen to paper based on the evidence collected.

Can’t wait to share our results with you!