Fixing legacy
Cleaning a product that has been built without a designer for 6 years
The starting point
The platform was targeted at a narrow B2B market of corporate traders. Every trader was precious, so losing any user would be a significant loss for the company.
We had to act carefully to avoid diverting any existing users but bold enough to improve the system during every sprint.
Research
We visited a few trading desks and interviewed traders, where we gained a bunch of insights. The most surprising was that they worked on rubbish old uncalibrated monitors in configurations 2x3 or 3x3.
We also interviewed team members who somehow interacted with our users.
Establishing relationships
When we started, the engineering team was highly skeptical about design. After all, they had worked for 6 years without a designer.
We had to find a common ground with them and change their attitude.
Approaches we used:
Maximum transparency. We asked engineers' opinions about every significant update and explained the logic behind it
Listening. We carefully considered all concerns and didn't move forward without being sure that engineers agree with a design
Suggesting dumb solutions. Sometimes, engineers said that something was impossible to do. In such cases, we suggested any solutions that came into my mind. The trick is, after the engineers' thinking process has started, finding a good solution is easy
Make my own hands dirty. For some tasks, it was quicker to code something by yourself than to ask somebody else
As a result, our work with engineers was smooth, and I even got praise from the CTO.
Top panel
We like to hit a few targets with one arrow, so we started redesigning from the top panel to:
Improve navigation
Focus people on the most important functions
Start building a brand
Show that the product is changing
Widgets
The system contained an enormous amount of information, which is why it worked like a desktop: users could create their own desktop using the most relevant widgets.
Our next step was to update the widget design. I started by fixing the old design's primary UI problems.
We created a bunch of new principles that were rolled out to all widgets.
At this moment, stakeholders decided to shift team efforts to new features, so we didn't have enough time to dig deeper and implement all of our ideas.
Outcome
The result was a much friendlier and memorable interface, and it got great feedback from our users.
