Mission Patches

I saw a great thing on twitter which inspired me:

Now I could gush about Co-op’s digital team on here for quite a long time, but suffice to say: they’ve got their shit together and are a regular source of inspiration.

Mission patches are a great way of celebrating milestones within a team. They are also literally badges of honour. So someone who went through that awful rewrite back in October; can mark it with a patch. The team that delivered that wildly successful feature X; yeah they got that patch.

By continuously adding mission patches it becomes a record of dedication, determination and longevity. It’s not hidden in a file or on a digital profile somewhere in your HR software. It’s real, its colourful and most importantly, its sticky.

After showing this example to our team and getting a good response I made some for our last major release. It was a big one. We’d redesigned & rebuilt the analytics and reporting section of SoloProtect Insights. A huge undertaking involving a lot of user research, user testing and prototyping. Not to mention the complex queries and development required to put it into production. I think we delivered something that wasn’t just an improved version of what went before, but was a completely new product over and above the previous reporting tools. And so this made the perfect first project for a mission patch and here it is:

ow then, the more eagle eyed amongst you will notice that says 5” by 5” which, it turns out is massive :). Soooooo it was a big release and, well….. it’s a big sticker. Live and learn.

As designers and developers of software, we’re not going into space but as a record of the spaces we’ve been, I think mission patches are a great way to mark a launch.