Existing DMS SaaS product has an aging monolithic frontend that was not built/maintained with focus on high volume growth (previous team did not have UX role/advocate) resulting in inefficiently long deliveries on feature/custom implementation updates at scale.
My aim was to rebuild the frontend in a way that could be modularized, improved TTL for new features, and maintainable at scale.
Team: 1 Product Manager/UX (me), 1 backend developer, 1 frontend developer
Old Frontend ⬇️
The old frontend was making calls directly to db — to resolve we built out a robust API to handle data so that the new frontend could be abstracted on a separate repo.
We chose to build in React to optimize data usage, utilize modern interface libraries, improve app navigation speed, and support more complex user interactions. Further, React is both modern but also mature with abundant online resources and active development that supported ability to grow team quicker by having a strong/interested talent pool for this technology.
The following screens show the mockups I created to kickoff a “proof-of-concept” MVP. Part of the UX process was determining what features our clients did not use — as we found using a combination of product analytics and feedback sessions with end-users that uncovered nearly 80% of features in the existing DMS went untouched by users. Using this data we were able to cut down the complexity of the app by providing an initial feature set that provided the most value at minimized intricacy.
The “proof-of-concept” MVP — including the functionality laid out in the above mockups — is currently built in production and being beta tested.
I have since added a UI designer to the project to start painting the final platform UI: