Butterfly

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the founder and director of Pause Fest.

What challenge were you trying to address with Butterfly?

I wanted to create a better user experience for our website. Another firm had developed our website, which is built on Joomla. I had to design the website, which I didn’t want to so I was really looking for someone to take it to the next level, and also look at what else is currently out there and how we can make the website better than it is.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started off with an in-person conversation where we discussed the objectives, the details, and extent of what they would be doing. After that, they got into wireframing, and once the wireframes were approved, they jumped into the design, which featured a refreshed look, feel, and UX [user experience].

They rearranged the navigation and focused on a few particular pages such as the home page, about page, and the schedule. There were a few pages that we didn’t have originally, but they designed for us in a way that tells a story.

What is the team dynamic?

They have a small team and I worked with 4 or 5 people during the project.

How did you come to work with Butterfly?

I had originally searched online for backend and frontend freelancers, or a company to help me update the website. I have a couple of friends who work at Butterfly. They mentioned they would be able to help me out with what I was looking for and were really interested in working on this project with me.

How much have you invested in them?

I spent about 35,000 AUD [$26,470 USD]. The payment is in kind. We’re exchanging services to the value of 35,000 AUD and giving them the same value at the end.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2017 and the project wrapped up in November 2017.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The website is interesting to look at with a beautiful layout and imagery. It has been quite a change for us. It is clean and has made our profile much bigger and better, as well as now working across different devices, which is very important for us. So far, we have received positive feedback, and my whole team loves it.

As well as beautiful, it needs to be functional as it is a point of conversion. It needs to charm and excite people so then they purchase tickets. Now, people don’t need to go to a third party to purchase tickets; they stay on the page and purchase the ticket right there and then. This integration has been great as I really wanted to keep our users on our website.

How did Butterfly perform from a project management standpoint?

They are good. It has been a bit of a tight deadline for them. There was a lot to be done in a relatively short period of time, going from sketches to wireframes, and the final testing and implementing. They performed well.

We initially met in-person a couple of times, and after that point, we mostly communicated through phone calls and emails. It all worked out well in the end and was a very good and easy experience.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I didn’t really know what the website would be like, but I was really blown away by their work on the design, usability, and functionality, as well as their level of experience. Everything rolled out easily and nicely. They designed the layout and I didn’t have any particular comments on things I disliked. They were flexible and very easy to work with, and they were always happy to help us out with any changes and add to the project.

Are there any areas they could improve?

For the scope that we agreed on, they really went beyond what was expected.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They provide great customer service and they are really nice people to deal with, in addition to them doing a great job. In comparison to other freelancers I have worked with in the past, they are super friendly and it is easy to work with, even when you are under pressure and there is a lot to do.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists [RANZCR] is a private medical college that provides training across 2 faculties, including clinical radiology and radiation oncology. I’m the CIO, and I’m in charge of all business applications across the whole organization. This includes operations, training, and all of the Cloud services.

What challenge were you trying to address with Butterfly?

Butterfly and RANZCR have had a partnership for about 9 years. They’ve helped us with hosting, design, and maintenance of our main website.

In 2014, I started the process of moving all of our websites and having Butterfly redesign them. They helped move them from a very small 1-person based company and hoster, which was inadequate for our organization and unstable with other providers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped us address what we were trying to do for each website, including our brand, and what we were trying to say to our members and internal campaign. Butterfly guided us with their expertise in design, helped us capture content, and introduced other companies to augment SEO [search engine optimization] services. Butterfly provided project management, a design and development team, and an operational component for website hosting.

We completely redesigned the website. Butterfly was instructed to keep within our architectural principles that were put in place for the college, which involves a both a WordPress and Joomla CMS [content management system]. We decided to only keep some of the content from the previous website in order to approach the redesign and information architecture from a mobile standpoint. We had a significant percentage shift in mobile website users, so Butterfly’s main focus was on that, but they also helped with the desktop version.  

They incorporated the corporate colors for our campaigns, and they also took us through the process so that they understood what we were looking for from a business perspective. They informed us of what the industry was doing regarding website functionality. We needed stronger searching capabilities, and we also needed to have clear pages that people would be able to move through easily.

Butterfly’s designers have come back on multiple occasions with wireframes, color palettes, and image prototypes that needed very little adjustments. They really understood what we were looking for.

The larger projects have been finished, but they’re going to help us with some interfaces, including our frontends, backends, and new CRMs [customer relationship management]. These projects will be smaller than the ones they’ve worked on in the past 2–3 years.

What is the team dynamic?

There are 3–5 people working on each project. We have a dedicated project manager, Beth [Senior Digital Producer, Butterfly] who has worked on multiple projects with us.

How did you come to work with Butterfly?

I built trust quickly with Liz [CEO, Butterfly] and the rest of the Melbourne-based team who has been working for us. Their systems are stable, and they get things done quickly while staying within our budget. I’m unsure how we originally found them, but it was an easy decision to have Butterfly host all of our websites.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $200,000–$1 million with them over the years.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in 2014, but they started working with RANZCR before that. We have an ongoing relationship.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They’ve changed the way RANZCR is viewed from a digital perspective. Our 3 key websites have won 7–8 internationally-recognized awards due to their design and website functionality.

We’ve had many comments stating that our website doesn’t look like it’s for a medical college, unlike our competitors. It’s very different due to its contemporary design and usability.

The member feedback and been positive, and although we changed domains, people still really like the websites. We’re seeing better click-through rates because people are now coming to our site to search, whereas before they were going to Google. They’ve significantly grown month after month, and the success of our campaign-advocacy information in reaching the public is working really well.

How did Butterfly perform from a project management standpoint?

I can’t recall any delays throughout any of the projects. I was pleased with their project management process and how they included stakeholders at the right time to keep them informed and updated. Butterfly set tasks and worked with those stakeholders because they understood that, as individuals, they had daily jobs to do outside of the project. I’ve handled many technical projects, and Butterfly’s project management was of a high standard.

We communicate through phone, email, video conferencing, Skype, and GoToMeeting. They have a prototyping tool which allowed us to provide comments online regarding the design process. They could read our comments, make appropriate changes to prototypes, then go into the standard system development life cycle of testing, production, and launch.

Beth [Senior Digital Producer, Butterfly] has worked on a number of our projects, and she’s great. She takes the task and gets the job done by finding the right design and development resources. She also has great rapport with the stakeholders inside RANSKR, so the trust they have in Butterfly is really high.

We are able to trust them to get the project done, and then come back to us with their solutions. They are accurate in their delivery every single time, which makes it easy for me, as head of IT, to keep things moving. I haven’t been overwhelmed with all of the details because I can simply oversee the process and let their teams take care of everything.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s easy to work with them, and we’re lucky to have found a team so close to us. It’s hard to find solid performers, and I normally don’t do references, but I would for them because they do such a fantastic job.

They’ve got a good network, and if they recognize that they don’t have a skillset, they will introduce people who we can both work with. They’ve got a solid reputation with other smaller, specialized companies that handle SEO.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything at this stage because of the success we’ve had with all of the projects over the past 3 years.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Potential clients should trust them because they have a seasoned team of designers and project managers. We gave them the independence to lead us through development, which is hard for some businesses to do. Sometimes, businesses get too involved in the details, which causes the end result to suffer. If Butterfly is given such independence, they will come out with a better product.