97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 44. Legacy Product? Imagine You’re Restoring an Old Farmhouse

Christopher Coy

The right attitude can make a huge difference when you’ve inherited an existing product. An analogy I use that helps positively frame the challenges of legacy systems and software is to imagine that you’re restoring an old farmhouse.

Like the farmhouse, products need regular upgrades and improvements to keep pace with the world as it changes around them. Even a small repair, like adding a new electrical outlet, might reveal an entire rat’s nest of old wiring...and turn a simple afternoon project into a weeklong undertaking. Tackling and patiently responding to these types of design and technical inheritances is hard—even for seasoned experts. As designers, we can leverage and anticipate these moments to model how UX is vital to improving the process and chance for success.

Here are seven strategies to address legacy product design:

1. Embrace the mess from the outset: You’re typically dealing with a tangle of code, product decisions, and temporary solutions that unintentionally became permanent. Accepting these factors as part of the design problem you’ve agreed to tackle will help you not get so frustrated as you seek to unravel them.

2. Bring key players together early and get them aligned: If you can’t get stakeholders to show up or care, it likely means you’re focused on the wrong goal/problem...or ...