Enterprise Application Design Overhaul
This was a multi-year project to refresh the design of a live SaaS application, the central product in a large insurance platform. I led the redesign effort, introducing a new design system and a strategic approach to ensure user acceptance.
A high-level overview of this project follows. A case study focusing on one area of the application is also presented.
“The platform suffers from a fragmented and inconsistent UX due to years of unstructured and sporadic design changes, creating inconsistent workflows, visuals, and interactions.
“Users consistently rank UX issues as a top complaint, citing poor navigation, unclear workflows, and inconsistent design. This increases support costs, prolongs onboarding, and limits adaptability for new business needs.
“A structured UX modernization—incorporating usability research, a design system, and workflow standardization—is needed to restore coherence and improve efficiency.”
“Too much empty space/poor usage of screen real estate”
“Tasks take me through different designs”
“System is too complex/Too many steps to complete common tasks”
Due to the constraints of a live enterprise product with ongoing feature additions, a change-managed, two-phase approach was necessary to manage user resistance and operational continuity risks.
My approved and adopted approach incorporated Jakob’s law and followed progressive change adoption principles, reducing risk by ensuring UX improvements were digestible and accepted.
Consistency & UX Debt Reduction
Address visual design, inconsistencies and pain points without disrupting core workflows to gain trust.
UX Overhaul with User Research
With trust established, implement deeper research-driven improvements involving mental models, IA, and workflows.
Working closely with product and project managers, care was taken to maintain a contiguous area of UX upgrades to prevent jarring UX switchbacks while the project was ongoing.
For each area, I conducted a heuristic evaluation and a review of user complaints to identify, prioritize and address the most severe pain points. This process focused on:
Fixing information architecture issues without causing changes to established mental models.
Resolving interaction design pain points without altering core workflows.
I created a new design system which introduced a visual update that would still be recognizable and non-disruptive to the userbase, ensured by early prototype testing.
Key improvements included:
More effective use of screen real estate, reducing visual clutter.
Card-based layouts with clearer hierarchical segmenting.
Improved data readability via refined typography, iconography, and color usage.
Replaced multi-layered tab controls with top and side navigation menus with only one level of submenu expansion, improving discoverability.
Used modern form controls with enhanced affordances.
Revamped features including the file upload, task continuation, dashboard, and alert experiences for clarity and efficiency.
Improved usage of wizards and step-by-step processes to simplify complex, error-prone workflows.
This phase refined mental models, workflows, and interactions to better align with user needs, aiming to reduce churn and to extend the platform’s lifespan. This was done through research-driven prototyping, user testing and iteration.
Unlike Phase One’s system-wide design consistency effort, Phase Two targeted areas with the most user complaints and rigid designs that limited automation and scalability.
One of the largest areas tackled was the accounting subsystem, a complex part of the system that required a major UX overhaul.
Samples from the design system documentation, the style guide and resource library follow. The original typeface was retained in phase one in order to maintain familiarity.