USA Swimming Unveils New-Look Website on Monday

USA Swimming unveiled a new look for its website on Monday, giving the site a badly needed update.

• Visit the new usaswimming.org here.

When USA Swimming launched its new website in March of 2017, the announcement was for a total site overhaul that completely changed the look of the governing body’s presence on the web.

That it certainly was. In spite of a significant cost outlay, the new website was severely lacking in many areas. While the addition of the Data Hub was a crucial upgrade for swim fans, in general the relaunched website was hard to navigate, hard to use, hard to reference, and constantly bogged down with errors.

About a year-and-a-half after that launch, USA Swimming was already back into a redesign schedule, taking their first trip to meet with Denver-based design firm Spire Digital to talk about making improvements to the site in December, 2018.

Since the last redesign, USA Swimming has seen a substantial turnover in its staff. While the prior redesign was overseen by then-Chief Marketing Officer Matt Farrell, who is no longer with USA Swimming, the new site was largely led by Jake Grosser, the organization’s Director of Business Intelligence. Hired in 2014, 2 years after graduating from Northwestern with a Master’s degree in Sports Administration, Grosser started his career with USA Swimming as a marketing manager (after 3 years at WME | IMG). There he worked primarily with the APA program, which involves governing body athlete appearances in exchange for an annual stipend.

In November of 2018, he was promoted to Director of Business Intelligence, which coincided with the ramping up of the latest redesign project.

This time, USA Swimming conducted extensive member research to see what people liked about the website and what people didn’t like about the website.

Among the major themes that they heard was that it took too many clicks to find information that people needed. This led to a reimagining of the sites header information, grouping resources by “swimmers & parents,” “coaches and team leaders,” “officials,” and other functional groups that would direct people to their most common resources more frequently.

That part of the project was definitely a success. Previously, pages that were basically impossible to find without using Google’s search engine as a primary navigation tool are now easily located via the top-level menus on the site.

The general feel of the site has substantially improved as well, with certain widgets and design elements being repeated throughout the site, making navigation feel more familiar and comfortable.

Among the major upgrades is the fact that every time a link is clicked, the new page that opens gets its own URL. In the previous version of the site, many pages were impossible to link to directly.

While the organization will fairly take criticism for having to do a major overhaul so shortly after a previous (and expensive) overhaul, Grosser was keen to point out that this redesign was far more “efficient” than the last. That’s because this time, the back-end structure of the site didn’t change, only the way it was displayed to the end user. That meant far less work on back-end databases and infrastructure that is far more costly and time-consuming than cosmetic front-end design elements.

Grosser says that the role out is a first major step, and that other changes will continue to be made as they receive more feedback on the new look.

The project, which is more than 18 months in the making, had a goal to be launched before the originally-scheduled 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials. While the global coronavirus pandemic pushed those Trials back until 2021, USA Swimming wanted to stay on track with that rollout.

While USA Swimming has been discussing an upgrade to its membership system, including digital registration, that is not included in this upgrade and is being treated as a separate project.

SwimSwam was given a preview of the new site last week. Below is a breakdown of our favorite updates and new features, and areas where we still think the site could use some improvements.

Best Upgrades:

• Moving the data hub from a singular place to a list of links in a drop-down menu is a huge upgrade. While the idea of the previous data hub was great, its navigability was a nightmare.
• While live streamed events on usaswimming.org will still likely be streamed on the home page, those live streams will also now have direct links, as will event pages (which previously didn’t).
• Finding things like meeting minutes is a lot more clear and straight-forward than it used to be. Documents can be sorted by years, filtering out a lot of the noise. Finding events and tickets is also much, much easier.
• The USA Swimming records team did extensive research and assembled historic teams going back to essentially the beginning of time. That includes Olympic, World Championship, and World University Games teams. For the true swim geeks, this is a treasure-trove of data.

Needs Some Work:

• Some data sets have been collapsed behind “see more” buttons that can make it harder to work with the information on those pages. Grosser says they’re still looking at some of those design elements and the best way to implement them.
• The times databases like event rank search and individual times search were pretty terrible to navigate previously, and they might have actually gotten a little worse with this upgrade. Fixing that will likely require a separate back-end overhaul and would have to be a better project. The swimrankings.net interface continues to be the gold standard, in our opinion.