Simplified a fragmented legacy back office experience
Introduced reusable patterns across modules and teams
Reduced manual input and improved operational workflows
Built a stronger foundation for future platform growth
The platform supported the full onboard retail sales lifecycle, from product development and supply chain to sales development and reporting. My role focused on UX strategy and roadmap definition, while helping transform a complex legacy back office into a more usable, consistent, and scalable experience.
Working closely with developers and stakeholders, I helped shape a shared design language that could support both the redesign of individual modules and the long-term evolution of the wider platform.
Stakeholder interviews, UI audit, heuristic evaluation
Lean Canvas, personas, empathy mapping
Component workshops, module planning, roadmap thinking
Reusable patterns, cleaner workflows, better hierarchy
Close collaboration with developers and stakeholders
Feed new learnings back into the design system
“Designing for operational systems means turning complexity into clarity without losing the depth the product needs.”
This project was not just about visual cleanup. It was about improving how teams worked with a complex operational platform that had grown over many years.
I worked on the redesign of the Onboard Retail Management Platform, a back office system used to manage the entire onboard retail sales lifecycle. The software had been evolving for over 10 years within a monolithic architecture, which led to usability issues, inconsistencies, and duplicated patterns across modules. As part of the Product Design team, I contributed to research, UX strategy, roadmap planning, and the development of a shared design system to support a more scalable product experience.
The main challenge was redesigning parts of a mature and highly complex system without disrupting the operational needs of the business. At the same time, the team was supporting a broader transformation toward microservices, which created an opportunity to rethink patterns, reduce inconsistencies, and make the platform simpler and more maintainable.
The existing Back Office Platform had grown over more than a decade, and with every new feature it became harder to use and harder to maintain. Patterns overlapped, documentation was fragmented, and the product lacked a shared source of truth for both designers and developers.
Before moving into solutions, we focused on understanding the real structure of the problem. Through stakeholder interviews, UI audits, workshops, and heuristic evaluation, we identified usability issues, duplicated components, and broader process gaps across the platform.
A key part of the work was not only redesigning separate modules, but also using those redesign opportunities to feed the design system. This allowed each product improvement to contribute to a more scalable and consistent foundation for future work.
The Aileron design system had originally been developed through a developer-driven model using Semantic UI and documented in Docz. While that gave the team a starting point, it did not provide a shared workspace for both designers and developers, and many parts of the system were difficult to reuse consistently across product work.
After gathering and grouping research insights, we explored tooling that could better support collaboration, documentation, and version control. This led to a stronger approach for evolving the design system and making it more accessible across teams.
As we redesigned individual modules, we also recreated and documented the most valuable assets, helping the system become more practical, more aligned, and more useful in day-to-day design and development work.
