Transforming a 30-Year Legacy Product Through Strategic UX Leadership
Overview
Role: Lead UX Designer | UX Strategy & Research Lead
Timeline: 2016-2017
Company: PROS (B2B SaaS Revenue Management)
Team: 2 Product Managers, 1 UX Researcher, UX Designer (me)
Context & Challenge
Business challenge
Strategic Approach
Rather than treat this as a lift and shift, I positioned UX discovery as a risk reduction strategy. I influenced Product leadership through bimonthly alignment meetings, framing research as a way to derisk a major platform investment, not a design preference.
Two outcomes followed: leadership funded a worldwide customer research tour, and committed to a full UX-led redesign over the cheaper conversion option.My strategic intervention:Impact: Shifted organizational mindset from technology first to user first product strategy.
Discovery & Research Phase
Research methods
I partnered with our UX Researcher to plan and execute an ethnographic study across Europe, Asia, and Oceania, visiting airline customers on site and observing analysts completing real work. I participated directly in interviews and observation sessions. We focused on four areas: persona development, ecosystem mapping, workflow analysis, and pain point identification.
Critical Strategic Insights
Insight 1: Analysts worldwide follow nearly identical workflows
This surprised me. Despite working at different airlines across different continents, analysts approached their core tasks in remarkably similar ways. PROS's tribal knowledge assumed every customer was unique, which had justified a sprawling "everything accessible everywhere" navigation model. The research invalidated that assumption and opened the door to workflow optimized information architecture.
Design implication: Optimize for common workflows rather than maximum flexibility, reducing cognitive load and training time.
Insight 2: Users didn't trust the application
Analysts maintained parallel filing systems and offline tools to validate decisions, revealing a fundamental trust deficit with the application's data presentation.
Design implication: Prioritize transparency and auditability to build confidence in the system.
Insight 3: Analysts spent minimal time in the PROS UI
The application was a checkpoint, not a continuous work environment.
Design implication: Design for speed and pattern recognition, not feature discovery.
Information Architecture Strategy
Research showed the existing right rail navigation, with access to 100+ screens, didn't reflect how analysts actually moved through their work. Since every analyst described markets (ex. Houston to Miami) as their primary unit of work, I organized the navigation around markets rather than features. The result was a two level dynamic tab system that surfaced recently viewed markets and kept users focused on what mattered most.
We knew Engineering would push back on the complexity. Before that conversation, I built a high fidelity Axure prototype to gather user feedback that would support the decision with evidence, not opinion.
Strategic Solution Process
Design Decision Rationale:
Since users all thought and communicated that markets (Houston to Miami) is the most important object to traverse the O&D data. I came up with the idea of organizing the navigation by markets. The problem is it needed to be dynamic because users are assigned specific markets. I created a two level dynamic tab navigation that provides context of what you viewed in the past while focusing the user on what matters the most, their markets.
Prototype Validation:
We recognized the advanced navigation design and knew Engineering would push back. We knew that we would need customer feedback that supports the value of the feature. I decided to build a Axure prototype to gather feedback from users on the navigation.
Cross-Functional Design Leadership
I facilitated collaborative design workshops using Crazy 8's methodology to move the team from research insights to design direction. Including Product Managers and Engineers in ideation created shared ownership and reduced friction later in implementation. One of the strongest ideas, a heat map visualization for availability deviation, came directly out of that workshop.
Prototyping & Validation
I built high fidelity Axure prototypes that dynamically applied heat map visualizations using integrated Excel data. The fidelity was intentional: realistic prototypes produce better feedback than image click-throughs because users respond to them as if they're real.
I partnered with our UX Researcher to test with 24 revenue analysts across 4 airline customers. I designed the task scenarios; the researcher facilitated sessions. We wanted to know if users understood the new navigation, could find the charts they used daily, and responded well to the market-focused experience.
What we learned
The market focused navigation was immediately understood and well-received. Users moved between pages without friction and responded positively to the modernized UI. Two surprises: several users thought the prototype was a live application, and a few questioned whether the heat map would provide enough detail with real data present, which was useful signal for the next iteration.
Organizational & Cultural Impact
Before this project, PROS gathered product requirements from external SMEs with no direct user contact. After: research validated strategy, cross functional workshops, and user informed prioritization became standard practice. The bigger win wasn't the redesign itself. It was shifting how PROS decided what to build.
Key Learnings & Strategic Insights
The finding that stuck with me most was how consistent analyst workflows were across the globe. I expected regional variation. Instead, users in Europe, Asia, and Oceania were doing the same tasks in nearly identical ways. That insight reframed the entire design problem and gave us the confidence to make strong, opinionated decisions about the information architecture rather than designing for every edge case.
This project also reinforced something I now treat as a principle: UX research isn't a phase you complete before design starts. It's the foundation that makes every downstream decision faster and less risky. The investment in research is what convinced leadership to fund a full redesign. Without it, PROS would have shipped an HTML conversion and replicated the same problems in a new coat of paint.