UX/UI Web App Modernization

The client is an established Canada-based vendor of on-demand printing services. They provide B2B and B2C companies (print stores, dealers, package and label producers) with a suite of web-to-print software for designing and printing custom photo products (business cards, signs, postcards, etc.).

The company has successfully run business for more than 20 years and won countless awards. There was only one problem. Their web-to-print services were designed 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since then.

In 2020, they realized that to outrun the competition they need to replace their outdated design with a fast and sleek web interface. The goal of the UX/UI modernization project was to redesign the legacy web application, revise and improve user experience, and enhance performance using modern frontend frameworks.

This change would secure the company’s leadership in the niche and boost client retention. Moreover, it would help them expand the line of services and, as a result, attract new customers and clients.

We began with a 6-week Discovery to conduct in-depth user research, study the competitor landscape, and work out a detailed project roadmap for the following redesign project. By the end of this phase, key stakeholders received:

• Defined project objectives.
• Detailed audience and competitor analysis report.
• Documented requirements and features for basic functional components (print store features, photo editing, designer workflow, etc.).
• Proposed redesign concept and new design outlook.
• UX/UI modernization project breakdown and estimate.
• Visualized project roadmap and timeline.

The engineering team was assigned to develop fast, highly interactive frontend with multiple image/photo editing and product design features (crop, resize, rotate, layers, guidelines, etc.) on top of eCommerce functionality (product pages, shopping cart, order and checkout, shipping, etc.). This was a non-standard task from the very beginning due to extremely high performance requirements. To address these requirements, the team:

• Moved essential business logic for editors/designers to the client application, thus turning it into a fully-fledged engine able to immediately respond to user commands and ensure zero latency.
• Chose a modern React framework to develop responsive UI that could withstand the trial of time and provide the requested performance and scalability.
• Used custom API to communicate with the .NET backend and third-party services providing seamless and secure connectivity.
• Leveraged unique domain expertise to implement image/product editing functionality and speed up project development.

Rich industry and tech expertise was the key to the successful UX/UI modernization of the client’s web application. Tapping into experience, the team could suggest an insight-driven design concept from the start and quickly solve complex engineering problems during the development stage without causing costly tests and refactoring.