Want to Modernize Your Tech Stack Quickly? Don’t Waste Time Building the Wrong Tools

When mid-market companies want to modernize their software systems, moving fast is the top priority.

But if those new systems aren’t intuitive, users won’t adopt them, defeating the purpose of building them in the first place. 

This puts product teams, in-house or external, in a tricky position. Under pressure to deliver working solutions yesterday, many rush through discovery to kickstart development. However, this often results in poor user adoption and costly redesigns, which only lengthen the timeline.

Anastasia Milokhina has spent five years navigating this challenge at Limestone Digital, the last three as the UX/UI design team lead. At Limestone, she has worked on numerous modernization projects for various clients, and she’s learned that it is possible to move through discovery quickly without compromising quality. To pull it off, UX/UI designers need to be directly involved in the process, so it feels less like traditional discovery and more like active product building.

Key Takeaways:

• Rushing through software modernization with a misunderstanding of user workflows leads to poor adoption and costly rebuilds.
• Involving UX/UI designers early in discovery allows product teams to learn what users actually need before building anything.
• Testing rough sketches of new interfaces with real users can help product teams validate concepts before moving to full development.

What do your users actually need?

Companies need to modernize their software systems because their legacy tech stacks are causing major headaches. They force users to juggle several disconnected systems with complex interfaces and unintuitive workflows.

“Unfortunately, it’s very common. I would say we can see it almost everywhere,” Anastasia explains.

And the pressure to move is palpable. With every minute they spend waiting, frustration builds internally. Meanwhile, they fall further behind their more agile competitors who are already taking advantage of all the efficiencies new solutions have to offer. 

“Stakeholders want something that’s working yesterday, and the budget often reflects that urgency as well,” says Anastasia, reflecting on the high-pressure situation. “The temptation always is to skip research, or cut the corners on design.”