SWOOP’s new look: a collaborative achievement

Today we're releasing a brand new look and feel for SWOOP. This has been a great piece of work to be involved in. I wanted to pause and thank some key people who have made this new-look SWOOP possible.

When we started SWOOP back in 2014, before we had our first customer, Ripple Effect Group Asia Pacific's Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Stephen Bartlett-Bragg took at gamble and offered us the assistance of two of their UX (User Experience) experts at cost. We did a handshake that we’d pay the full rate when we got our first paying customer. I can’t tell you how proud I was when we could go back to Anne and Stephen and say; “Please send us the invoice for the outstanding amount. We have a customer!” One of the key people we worked with was James Dellow, whom I had worked with in a previous job. James had provided oversight and advice the whole way and we felt in like were were guided by a pair of safe hands.

Fast forward six years and while we’d done a ton of work on our original SWOOP User Interface (UI) it was time to rethink the design. In the meantime James had set up his own business - Chieftech - and we met over a lunch (remember those days?) in Sydney to discuss the idea of a refreshed SWOOP and I was looking again to draw on James’ overall experience and network to find the right people to make it all happen. We have some expertise in-house, but lacked subject matter expertise in some areas and were also short on capacity.

We knew we needed to start with the basics so James introduced us to Gary Bunker from The Fore to do a usability review for us. Gary did a stellar piece of work highlighting quick wins and helped us set the future UX direction (which you’ll start to see more of in coming months). Through our own network we were also introduced to Kelly Tall, an expert in data visualisation, to give us advice on how to present data in the most useful way.

Armed with these insights, James introduced us to Jack McClintock to help turn strategy into an actual design. On James’ recommendation we got Jack to develop a whole design system, and I’ve been in awe of what he managed to deliver to us in a short space of time. The design looks fresh and modern. We fell in love with it straight away. I hope you do too!

Now we had a design that matched our strategy, but we knew our team didn’t have the capacity to quickly turn design into code. James again pulled a rabbit out of his hat and introduced us to Wollongong-based design firm Vivo. In our original technical architecture of SWOOP we had deliberately separated the UI layer, a decision that paid off now. We could provide Vivo with access to the UI layer without having to give them access to any of our systems or data. That’s critical when data security is a top priority.

Led by Ben Tucker (tech) and Ed Birchall (design) they moved at great speed and within a couple of weeks we saw the new-look SWOOP coming together in front or our eyes. Their professionalism and collaborative approach has been outstanding, and they greatly complemented the capabilities we have in-house in SWOOP.

I’m delighted we were able to draw exclusively on local Australian talent to make it happen which makes me really proud. There’s a great pool of talent right here on our own shores, but finding these people would have been daunting without James’ recommendations.

Getting the design implemented in our own test and production environment was relatively straight forward task for our engineering team, but there’s a lot of moving parts, so I’ve been so impressed with how our engineers have risen to the challenge of delivering this on time. But it’s not just a technical task to deliver a new UI. Our customer success and communications teams have been working tirelessly to keep customers updated about what’s coming, and preparing documentation. It’s been a big effort, but we’re so excited about it.

As you’ll appreciate, this has been a very collaborative exercise. Collaboration internally in SWOOP, collaborating externally with customers, partners and service providers. It’s all been done remotely. SWOOP was designed to be a distributed business from day one. We don’t have offices, we’ve never all met face-to-face. What’s become normal for most teams during the pandemic has been they way we’ve been working for the past six years. The UI redesign was no different. Apart from my lunch with James Dellow last year, I haven’t seen him in person since. I’ve never met Gary, Jack, Ben or Ed face to face. But I still feel incredibly close to them and have trusted them 100%. They earned that trust by delivering to our expectations on time and on budget. Would it have been great to meet them in person to collaborate? Absolutely! I love people and I love the energy I get from being in a room brainstorming on a whiteboard, but I challenge anyone who claims that remote work can’t be done just as successfully.

Now on to Phase 2. We’re packing SWOOP with more evidence-based ‘nudges’, recommendations and goal-setting. Can’t wait!