Approaching any design project comes with a certain amount of exploration and research. While some projects start with completely new design systems, more often than not designers are tasked with creating new UI to fit within an existing system or brand. Finding the right balance between solving problems with new UI and old while focusing on improving user experience is the key to successful design.
For the Account Center project, we had an additional challenge to work with a partial redesign concept from a previous project. While these design mockups had some mid to high fidelity, a lot of the concepts were just that; concepts. User stories and other planning methodologies were not baked into the designs, so many of the user journeys were not complete or even thought of during the mockup process.
Instead of throwing out all the previous effort, we quickly started to categorize what of the mockups were usable and what we needed to discard or augment. Instead of focusing on visuals first, we invested in understanding the user needs and business goals of each interface. We believe the best solutions come from working together, and by building our user stories with the entire team, we were able to better understand what our overall design goals were and how to prioritize them.
After we established a cadence of communication around user needs, we were then able to quickly fold in the visual design aspects of the project. Since this was a rewrite of an existing application, we were careful to ensure that the brand direction was within their internal marketing teams’ guidance. There was also an opportunity for us to help the team create consistency and design guidelines for future iterations and other applications where they could reutilize the same look and feel.
It was easy for us to see and feel the momentum around the project through our communication style. We worked in fast feedback loops with the client team, often utilizing diagrams, fast prototypes, and optional design paths. Having the ability to send these designs up the chain and receive real-time feedback created an agile environment without limiting curiosity or experimentation. We were able to balance reprioritizing business objectives and user experience needs without headache.