from GUI & usability to UX/UI design

Initial context

In 2012, a B2B software company outsourcing mainly to Netherlands, Germany and occasionally UK or other EU countries to businesses in education, medical, finance, and others – hired me initially on a front-end developer position, but really for my web design portfolio and interest for GUI & usability.

The company was very technical initially, without in-house designers, focusing on development services and leaving UI/UX oriented aspects to the clients, which had own/in-house, or used 3rd party, or improvised.

The opportunity and start
If ISDC had UI/UX as a service, it would’ve been easier for everyone, avoiding less qualitative results (UI/UX wise), and adding UI/UX as a capability and service. The scope of my hire was kickstarting design services and awareness of heuristics in the company. 

Initially I was assigned to a project as front-end, having HTML & CSS knowledge. In parallel I started preparing a presentation aimed at bringing awareness about usability, best practices, samples of dos and don’ts and other tips and patterns from GUI manuals from Apple and Google as well as important ideas I felt relevant and impactful then (still do) – like Simon Sinek’s Golden circle, and Elen Lupton’s advice if you have to break the rules – brake them from a perspective of knowledge and not ignorance (Thinking with type).

Getting inertia
Started having UI design responsibilities in the initial project I was assigned to (education). With a few adjustments, used the presentation to align awareness on UI standards & usability with the project’s team on the client side, and was also assigned to assist with UI design on their partner project (facilitation of exam rooms).
After the initial presentation, other projects started to gradually use the UI design services to ensure good consistency, good standards and better quality of experience, but the UX research was not yet a specific service, having to work directly with provided requirements.

Keeping momentum
Eventually ISDC was bought by Endava (another bigger IT company).
So to align the teams I did a survey again, in both sides, and included the results in a presentation about Personas for a yearly internal event. The event was meant to raise awareness on UX in the now greater company – we called it “UX day” and it had at least 2 editions (last I know being before I left the company and Romania).
Projects and workshops continued with more focus on UX research and iterative envisioning tasks.

Understanding the business
– Discovery interviews with stakeholders and team members;
– Attending congresses;
– High level taxonomy of components, services, user types, and main user tasks;
– Reviewing existing UX artifacts like personas and feedback surveys.

Workshops with stakeholders, Dev team, and user representatives (CS)
– Design sprint format to explore and validate product direction;
– Mapped pain points, expectations, and opportunities
– Clustered insights using sticky notes, then grouped and prioritized them collaboratively
– Used dot voting to determine top priorities;
– Split teams for dedicated session of brainstorm for the top 3 most voted items/high level scopes found;
– Held cross-team presentations and debates to refine ideas


Structuring the resulted information and delivering it to stakeholders/product team

– A personas library existed but we narrowed it down to a structure of user groups and defined 3 categories of personas per task complexity and expectations of proficiency:
a. low complexity for attendees and the contribution portal,
b. mid complexity for the contribution portal and administration system;
c. high complexity for the administration system
(eg. attendee sites should have the low complexity as the main persona; while admin system being a complex context to allow high complexity but have focus on the mid complexity persona while also allowing some compromises for the low complexity persona).

Rebuilding the legacy UI
Identified most important components and initial sequence from workshop + followup interviews with stakeholders, dev-team, and users representatives (using Miro as for centralizing).

Drafted UI components, navigation patterns, and page types/templates like:
– overview landing page;
– dashboards for the main item types with charts, simple search toggle to advanced search and filtering abilities;
– control over what columns can be seen with order and sort;
– actions on all, a selection or individual items;
– detail pages of items from the dashboards, or from an app level search tool, or from settings pages;
– defined pattern of facilitating help tips and content throughout the application;
– used WP for creating and managing help content that can be called holistically from the top of the app or contextually in dedicated areas in pages.


Iterated drafts with the product team, dev-team and users.
– made initial HTML/CSS static prototype;
– created a style-guide and shared it with the dev. team, Sketch to Zeplin (2018 – 2019, would have done it with Figma if later);
– Aligned with UI dev. lead for using BEM as naming convention for the design system;
– ensured an always visible feedback tool for users;
– kept legacy UI with announcement and link to the new one – for a period both in parallel;
– After release, periodic check with in-house user-base to identify remaining pains or incompletion.

Setting a Requirements + UX/UI team process for further effort and new features
– dedicated Miro template to cover the scope of the feature, stakeholders expectation and user-base connections for validation and insights;
– also to cover specifics like need of reporting, or consideration of API updates, as well as need for trainings or help content.
– More…