It’s going to be a big year for Optimal Workshop, with the recent announcement of a NZ$10m investment by New Zealand private equity firm, Pioneer Capital.  We caught up with Andrew Mayfield, Optimal Workshop’s CEO, to find out the story behind the investment, why now, and what it means for the future.

The Tech start-up route isn’t for everyone but you’ve been part of Optimal Workshop’s success story from early on when it was ‘just 4 people in a windowless room’! What appealed to you back then?

“I worked on the initial prototype for Optimal Workshop with our founder, Sam Ng, in 2007 and eventually joined the team myself to take over from Sam two years later. When I was handed the reins the brief was simple: create ‘kick-ass tools that make life easier.

With this focus on tools to make life easier, life online especially, we settled on a suite focussed on user experience research. It’s turned out to be a field that’s grown an average of 40% year on year so there’s no reason to leave that field. In fact, I’d say Optimal Workshop has been a strong part of enabling the UX field, and user research especially, to grow as it has.”

So, that early focus on user experience was a good call, ahead of the curve even?

“It was timely I guess.  People were just starting to appreciate user experience as a key differentiator.  I’ve always thought of it as a necessary shift in the way people think about design. That you’d consider your users and you might follow specific methodologies so you can do that consistently and inclusively. Ideally, much of what we call user experience would eventually be considered a natural part of any good design process. It’s just good practice as a designer to consider the real, diverse, and evolving needs and context of the people who actually use what you make.” 

When you put it that way it feels pretty compelling, even common sense. Fast forward 14 years, what’s the attitude towards UX now?  

“What’s interesting now is there are so many people practicing user experience.  When we started there was no UX-specific education, no university courses.  Everybody in the field had come from some other field and they were all bringing their influences from somewhere else and I found that very interesting. 

Every person I spoke to provided a different lens. It seemed to me that everyone had entered the field, even if it meant dropping some other illustrious career, because they cared about trying to make things, digital things primarily, substantially better than what was available at the time. And by and large they did this by listening to real people doing real things, in real contexts..  Simple, but almost unheard of at the time.

The field of UX has matured a lot over time but there’s still a long, long way to go. If anything, good information is getting harder to find so we still have a lot more work to do."

Clearly, you have big plans for the future. You’ve just announced pretty exciting news - getting an investor, Pioneer Capital, on board.  Why now?

“We are in a big market and from the start our users have almost pulled the product out of us. It has never felt like we've needed to push anything uphill. We've grown organically to a point where we now feel comfortable that we have all the foundations in place for a truly great company. The team is hungry to have a greater impact and to grow fast — so it’s time to put some more fuel in the tank and get on with it.

Pioneer Capital is a great fit for us as they want to help us build a great company that’s fit to endure, and they’d already had us on their radar for some time.”

Sounds like good timing all-around.  What kind of growth are you hoping to achieve with Pioneer Capital’s support?

“There’s been a real elegance in growing organically because you only do what is necessary and what customers absolutely appreciate. We've been growing our team at the speed of revenue growth. This means we've only really been able to hire for roles when we really need them. Now with funding, we can look ahead and hire for what we expect to need tomorrow, instead of what we needed yesterday."

Exciting times.  What’s the key to keeping Optimal Workshop ahead of the game?

“Keeping our customers at heart. Many companies say it, and it’s addictive once you start doing it. Once you start listening to people and give them what they need - which isn’t necessarily what they asked for - it’s very gratifying. That's what we’re going to continue doing."

You can find out more about the NZ$10 million investment by New Zealand private equity firm, Pioneer Capital in our media release.

Today we’re launching a new look for Optimal Workshop. While it’s a new direction for us visually, there’s also a little more to this story than meets the eye. This new identity represents a total rethink about how we present ourselves to the world, from our tools like OptimalSort and Reframer to way we present updates just like this one.

This brand update was a 7-month effort from concept through to execution, involving talents from both inside and outside the walls of our Wellington Office. Here, we’ll share a little about what made us decide to make this change and where you’re going to see the biggest changes.

So, without further adieu…

Why we made this change

• We’d experienced a lot of change and grown at a rapid pace – Our previous brand had grown organically for 12 years. But we’ve matured, and we need a brand identity that will continue to grow with us. 
• We needed a brand that’s accessible to all – We place accessibility at the heart of our product decisions, and we wanted the same for our brand. Our previous design guidelines often made this a struggle.
• We needed a brand identity that clearly communicates what we do – Our brand needs to be clear, flexible and robust. A brand system that’s simple to configure means it’s easier to create new assets and ensures every bit of the design is usable, beautiful and communicates our value clearly.

What’s new

Here’s a quick round-up of some of the changes you can expect to see around the place – from the big things like our company logo right through to the smaller tweaks we’ve applied across the website.

Our tools

When you log back into your account, you’ll find that everything works exactly the way that it did before – we’ve just applied a fresh coat of paint. Of course, if you do happen to come across any bugs or quirks, get in touch with our support team by clicking the little blue chat icon in the bottom right corner of the screen.

Our logo

The most noticeable change is front and center with our logo. We’ve evolved it to outline what’s important. Now, we like to think that you can interpret it in a few different ways:

• A cycle of learning
• Circling the answer/highlighting the solution
• Putting “Optimal Workshop” at the centre

We’ve also designed our new logo to be quite flexible. We’re able to swap out the colors as well as the “O” to celebrate special occasions, people and events:

Our colors

We’ve also refreshed our color palette. We still love green and blue, but we’ve introduced yellow as well as a few other options. Here are the highlights (no pun intended):Our new brand color is yellow. The color of Post-it notes, smiley face emojis and bright ideas. We hope it represents things like warmth, approachability, insight, discovery and enlightenment.

Our new colour palette ranges from yellow through to green and blue. We use tints of yellow to allow flexibility and accessibility when designing, while the dark navy is versatile and reliable. We place an emphasis on whites and grey tints for freshness and lightness.

We also use accent colors to add more variety and life. We’ll let you find these on your own as you experience the new palette on our website.

Our typeface

One of the biggest improvements we’ve made to the accessibility of the website comes in the form of our new typeface. Obviously Sans is our new heading typeface – it has a “steady” style, but it’s also quite interesting structurally.

You’ll see Obviously Sans throughout the website, app and blog. It’ll also make its way into our emails and other comms too!

Highlighting what matters

The act of highlighting something is universally understood. We all use highlighters and we all know what it means when we highlight something. Highlighting to find patterns is what research is all about.

We often highlight to:

• Discover themes
• Uncover insights
• Simplify complexity
• Emphasize meaning

Here’s what the highlighting looks like in practice:

Wrap-up

So, that’s our brand refresh. We’re still the same Optimal Workshop, just with a new look that better represents who we are and what we do.

We’re trying to become an ever-more important part of the work that user experience professionals carry out every day. Whether that means hosting user interviews, validating their ideas, testing and probing their information architectures or running surveys, we want to be a part of it.

We believe in better experiences for all and putting people at the heart of decisions. The team at Optimal Workshop genuinely enjoy working together to build something that will leave the world in a better state than we found it.

Join us on the journey – there’s more to come.

Start: Check out our brand new website

What an epic year. It’s certainly been one of significant change for us. We’ve welcomed a number of talented new people into our family (our team has grown by 64%), traveled around the world to visit and learn from our community, and refined and expanded our tools.Here’s what’s been going on at Optimal Workshop this year.Changing how we workOne of the biggest internal changes we made this year was to switch from primary working groups based on roles to smaller cross-functional teams called squads. Each of the squads has a set of objectives tied to the overarching goals of the company and they’re left to determine how to best meet these objectives. What’s more, squads are also self-managing, meaning they have no assigned manager. It’s different, and it’s working well for us. People are reporting higher levels of autonomy, enjoyment and focus.

Our Community Education squad hard at work.

We’ve also learned more about the importance of clarity this year, which I think is to be expected given our growth. I read a great article from Brené Brown, where she notes that “clear is kind, unclear is unkind”. Building a shared understanding is hard, and it’s well worth it.Happy and healthy

A highlight reel of some of the amazing smoothies and juices we’ve sampled this year.

What started as an initiative to cut back on our coffee consumption (and the subsequent afternoon slumps) has turned into a daily tradition here. We continued to make fresh fruit and vegetable juices daily this year, promoting healthy dietary decisions and giving everyone something to look forward to in the morning. I think we’ll just keep doing this as long as it seems like a good idea! If you’d like to hear my rationale for these kinds of crazy initiatives, here it is: If we expect people to come in and do their best work, we need to create an environment that’s conducive to people working at their best. Read the Stuff article about us here for more information and a video.Hitting the road (again)

Karl repping the Optimal Workshop team at the DesignOps Summit in New York City this year.

We’ve been to a lot of events this year, both at home and abroad. In fact, our team traveled a cumulative 205,349 miles in 2018 to connect with our community face to face. While that’s not quite the distance to the Moon, we were pretty close! I guess that’s the price of living in New Zealand, tucked away at the bottom of the globe (the bottom right corner on most maps).Moving house

Our new (still under construction) home.

In what’s possibly the biggest piece of news in this post, we’re moving into a new office late next year. Allen Street has been good to us, but it’s time to grow into a new space. Where are we moving, I hear you ask? Well, we’re actually taking over a piece of Wellington history and setting up shop in the converted Paramount picture theater. We’re really excited to share more with you – and even more excited to move in there ourselves!Our getaway to Riversdale

It’s always a good idea to bring a drone with you!

It’s no secret we like to do things a little different here – and the end of the year is no exception. Instead of hanging around in the office on a Friday afternoon or going out to a bar, we arose bright and early and clambered aboard a bus to head over the hill to the Wairarapa for a very traditional Kiwi beach day. Highlights included paintball, ping pong, some lovely team meals, freezing swims in the ocean and much celebration. It was certainly a great way to see the end of the working year in.Until next year

Anyway. That’s all for my end of year update. We really love what you do and we can’t wait to get right back into making this suite of tools the best, most cohesive home for your research that it can be. I’ve said it before, but we want to be the place where you and your team find signals in the noise and meaning in the mess. After all, we’re all about helping you create meaningful experiences.Keep your eyes peeled. We’ve got many more exciting changes on the way in 2019.As ever, we’re just getting started.Andrew MayfieldCEO