We provide course about How To Modernize Legacy UX (Without Breaking Everything). In this 2-days-workshop, you´ll learn how to untangle and overhaul legacy UX - modernize, migrate and eventually sunset it, without breaking the product along the way.
Content:
Dealing with legacy feels like fighting windmills. It's exhausting, frustrating, and usually going nowhere. It doesn't just slow you down. It creeps into every decision, blocks good ideas, drains effort and leaves little to show for it. How do you ship good work when the system itself is working against you?
You’ll learn:
• Hard truths about legacy, why it persists, hard to replace
• Systems thinking, how to use it to untangle legacy
• Five legacy migration strategies, how to choose the right one
• Feature parity vs. outcome parity, when to innovate vs. replicate
• Frankenstein dilemma: what to migrate, carry forward and cut
• “Big bang” vs. incremental rollout, why both are dangerous traps
• Mitigate risks of big failures, unknown unknowns, “Black Swans”
• Modernization strategy: UX facades, off-ramp, the strangler fig
• Migration UX for data, workflows, mental models, long-standing habits
• Legacy UX research: methods that work, how to use them
Course outline:
Module 1 - Legacy Mindset: Hard Truths and UX Nightmares:
• Why legacy is so hard to work around, and so difficult to replace. Different types of legacy, liability but business-critical, heavy customization, risk of spiraling costs, migration failures, delays.
Module 2 - Mapping Legacy and Systems Thinking:
• You can't redesign in 10 months what was fine-tuned over 10 years. How to map and transfer legacy thinking with systems thinking, top task analysis, workflow analysis, dependency mapping.
Module 3 - UX Research in Legacy: Methods That Work:
• UX Research methods for B2B and Enterprise, right-to-left thinking, failure analysis, legacy UX interviews, frequency/severity scoring - how to surface knowledge before touching anything.
Module 4 - Tackling Legacy UX: Modernization + Migration:
• The Frankenstein dilemma: how to choose what to migrate, carry forward and cut, feature parity vs. outcome parity, replicate vs. rethink. Migrating data, workflows, mental models.
Module 5 - Five Migration Strategies: How to Choose the Right One:
• Big-bang, incremental, strangler fig, dark launch, canary releases, off-ramp backdoor UX. How to choose, when to combine - and why both big bang and incremental carry hidden traps.
Module 6 - Turning On The Switch:
• Switch-and-transfer UX, retraining, attaching new system to established legacy flows, repairing failures, adapting for customer-specific overrides.
Module 7 - Overcoming Resistance and Mitigating Risks:
• Power users as power blockers, building alliances, pre-onboarding, co-designing with experts, essential vs. accidental complexity, Black Swan, when to work through, route around, or let go.
Instructor: Vitaly Friedman
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. Born in Minsk, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany. While writing algebra proofs and preparing for software engineering at nights in the kitchen, at the same time he discovered passion for typography, interface design and writing.
After working as a freelance designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine back in 2006, a leading online magazine for designers and developers. His curiosity drove him from interface design to front-end to performance optimization to accessibility and back to user experience over all the years. Vitaly is the author, co-author and editor of Smashing Books, and a curator of Smashing Conferences.
He is the UX lead with the European Parliament and Smashing Magazin and front-end/UX consultant in Europe and abroad, working with large and small companies and organizations like Haufe-Lexware, Axel-Springer and others. He also runs Measure UX and Smart Interface Design Patterns, friendly video courses on UX and design patterns, along with a live UX training for passionate UX and product designers.
Target audience:
Who this workshop is for:
• Product designers and PMs in large organizations and orgs where "we can't touch that" is the default response
• UX Leads and Service designers who want to explore a strategy to tackle and improve legacy UX in complex environments.
• Design managers and researchers who want to move a needle with legacy systems, without breaking everything along the way.