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I lead the design team for this project where our work involved modernizing a critical legacy product. Our challenge was to heighten overall usability to increase productivity and enhance customer service for a large national business that spanned industries such as insurance, travel and automotive. We addressed key problem areas with a product mindset, focused on delivering a streamlined experience despite the technical and design challenges of developing across two platforms, Salesforce and Cloud Native, both with separate design systems which needed to somehow feel cohesive between experiences. Additionally, we remained cognizant of the change management implication of breaking the status quo.
Discovery was a huge part of this project. We observed two user groups, a Member Services Agent and Sales Agent during user interview sessions, asking them to walk us through how they’d complete tasks important to their work, and watching where they got stuck. We found that both customer-facing users and Admins were creating their own platform workarounds on the legacy system, which wasn’t funneling them toward a predictable path of success. Users also couldn’t identify why they were encountering errors and the system lacked proper feedback to guide them back on track. Often the interface was overwhelmed with heuristic violations, while the system lacked sufficient tools and data which created friction, bottlenecks and too much complexity.
It’s natural for clients working with legacy products to approach the redesign process with apprehension. Taking a legacy product into the future impacts a person’s everyday life. We guided this project with a gentle but firm hand, ensuring that organizational impact was mitigated through thoughtful design choices and user testing. We pushed for progress, but not just for the sake of progress. We built trust by shepherding success that was approachable and by staying in scope—questions like what’s best for your users and what’s best for your spend guided our design process.
