Redesigning legacy platform for intuitive, transparent, omnichannel workflows
Due to NDA restrictions, certain details of this project have been redacted or generalized.
Context
Vanguard is a global leader in investment management, serving more than 30 million investors across 20 countries. To support it's vast scale, the firm sought to completely modernize its legacy retirement platform. The project aimed to transform heavy, opaque task workflows into a intuitive, transparent, and responsive experience with advanced capabilities for 1+M users.
We designed over 2,500 responsive screens, ensuring that intricate financial tasks remained intuitive and consistent across desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints.
My role
As part of a four-member UX team, I helped modernize a track of Vanguard’s legacy retirement platform.
Defined the information architecture by rethinking and simplifying the complex navigation structure of the legacy platform.
Designed low-fidelity wireframes to explore concepts and validated them through reviews with product stakeholders.
Developed high-fidelity wireframes to translate the approved flows into detailed interface designs for different breakpoints.
Collaborated in developing 300+ data-driven prototypes for usability testing.
I led structured QA reviews across multiple tracks of the project to ensure seamless handoff to engineering.
Drove the project through development, ensuring design consistency and alignment with business requirements.
Approach
The approach moves from understanding goals, mapping features and designing user flows to ideating and developing UI solutions.
A strong emphasis is placed on an iterative loop between quality checks and usability testing, ensuring continuous refinement, design system adherence, and real user validation.
Once validated, the designs are documented and handed off to engineering, with continued support throughout the development phase to address design updates, clarifications, and implementation needs.
Discovery
Workshop series
Conducted multiple workshops and recorded walkthroughs with Product Owners (POs) and stakeholders to map out existing platform capabilities.
Strategic mapping
Built "Intake Documents" and "Capability Worksheets" to map the gap between legacy features and new requirements, effectively defining the new platform architecture.
Task flow recreation
Re-iterated current task flows to identify opportunities and insights for optimization, ensuring a clear understanding of the "what, when, and why".
Ideation
Collaborated directly with client UX teams to develop low-to-mid fidelity wireframes, comprehending the application more profoundly.
Proactively applied WCAG Level AA principles to input fields, form structures, and navigation patterns early in the ideation phase.
Conducted phased review meetings, incorporating feedback into the design wireframes.
Usability testing
Real-data prototypes
Built over 300 detailed mid-fidelity prototypes using real environment data points to ensure accuracy.
Subject expert testing
Conducted two phases of testing with subject experts, documenting and prioritizing their feedback for implementation.
Solution
Navigation & Information Architecture
Redesigned UI with clear and intuitive information architecture, enabling seamless navigation across sections.
Structured content according to information hierarchy for clarity and ease of use.
Minimized long scrolling to streamline user interactions.
Decision Support & Transparency
Introduced a consolidated detail page to support informed decision-making and improve efficiency.
Added informative tags to enhance status visibility and tracking.
Enhanced transparency in communication through clear, accessible information.
Action Clarity & Efficiency
Standardized CTAs to clearly communicate available actions and accelerate bulk operations.
QA
Given the scale of project, a rigorous quality assessement process was implemented with 3 phase testing, incorporating collaboration with teams working on different tracks of Vanguard platform.
This established strong design consistency across tracks, improving clarity in client presentations, accelerating alignment, and allowing focus to move from minor UI discrepancies to strategic experience improvements.
Impact
Our team transformed a fragmented legacy system into a scalable, user-centric ecosystem, earning a perfect 5/5 client rating for a successful, on-time handoff.
Increased effectiveness
Reduced cognitive load by enriching the information architecture and standardizing CTAs, enabling faster decision-making.
Visual consistency
Replaced opaque, text-heavy interfaces with a clean, hierarchy-driven UI applied consistently across 2,500+ screens.
Inclusive design
Built inclusivity into the core by strictly integrating WCAG Level AA principles for color, contrast, and form structures.
Omnichannel experience
Delivered a fully responsive ecosystem, ensuring seamless task management across Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile breakpoints.
Reflection
Challenges
Learnings
Domain complexity
Transforming heavy, opaque legacy workflows into a modern, transparent experience.
Mastered enterprise UX
Learned how to effectively use UX practices without disrupting the speed and efficiency of expert users who relied on the old system.
Strict constraints
Innovating within a rigid, pre-existing design system across multiple tracks with thousands of interface.
Systematic thinking
This sharpened my ability to use constraints as creative tools, ensuring consistency at a massive scale.
Accessibility at high complexity
Designing without compromising accessibility and the data density required by expert users.
Inclusive design
It taught me the power of inclusive design, by applying WCAG principles deeply into complex components rather than treating accessibility as an afterthought.
Global collaboration
Syncing design operations across offshore and onshore teams in different time zones.
Operational efficiency
I developed strong cross-cultural communication skills, managing client meetings while keeping production moving.
Recognition
The cross-cultural collaboration between the onshore and offshore teams was highly commended by project leadership. My specific contributions to the team's output including driving consistency and supporting client visit showcases were recognized with multiple Insta Awards.
