Summary
Lots of legacy enterprise product suites are being re-platformed to become updated SaaS offerings and offer richer, responsive, device agnostic experiences. While the benefits of such initiatives are many for the business and their customers, it also comes wrought with many major challenges in strategy, technology, time to market and managing change and disruption for the existing customer base. This talk will present a case study and 10 learnings from a 4-year long re-platforming journey of UKG Ready, a HCM product suite. As we follow the journey, we will also learn from UX strategy and contributions at each stage.
Key Insights
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Re-platforming legacy applications is a multi-layered journey that requires balancing technology, business goals, and evolving user needs.
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A blended approach, including a visual refresh on legacy UI and prioritizing high-frequency use cases, can ease the transition.
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Power users often get neglected in responsive redesign efforts, causing adoption issues despite focusing on majority users like employees and managers.
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UX teams grow through the journey from embedded problem-solvers to strategic stakeholders influencing product and ecosystem design.
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Hyperfocus on isolated features or personas risks losing sight of broader user mental models and ecosystem consistency.
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Designing for change management is as critical as designing for product usability, especially in SaaS subscription models.
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Metrics like net revenue retention, attach rates, and time to value are crucial for measuring adoption and renewal.
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Managing customer resistance requires patience, distinguishing actual pain from initial resistance and gathering broad, contextual feedback.
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Internal alignment on change rationale and support messaging is key to avoid mixed signals during rollout phases.
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Continuous empathy and morale support for internal teams is essential to navigate the long, transformative re-platforming process.
Notable Quotes
"It’s really hard to make changes to these systems because it’s risk-ridden and a major undertaking."
"There isn’t one single formula that works every time for a re-platforming journey."
"Our mandate was to simplify the experience for end employees and managers, but we neglected our power users and that really hurt us."
"The sum of parts is not always the whole — we lost sight of the mental model in our employee record feature."
"Designing for change management is just as important as the product experience strategy."
"Don’t forget the critical change agent persona — adoption and success was determined by the admin or practitioner users."
"Support agents were sometimes telling customers to stick with the old UI, which sent mixed signals and questioned our change."
"You have to give the dust some time to settle when managing resistance."
"We added an in-product feedback framework and used the UMUX scale to get feedback at scale and distinguish true pain points."
"The re-platforming journey is transformative not just for the product, but for the people and teams involved."
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