Big Question
How do you make a 40 year old, organically created mainframe software usable for modern humans and devices?
CLIENT
Fedex
ROLE
UX Designer
TEAMMATES
Matthew Hamm, Anton Legoo
Project Context
40 years of business innovation without technology investment left FedEx with a problem- most of their shipping business was powered by mainframe software, and then only people who knew how to navigate it wanted to retire.
Entering the 21st century
Mainframe screens
Modernized screens
For each mainframe screen, we had to map and track all of the data points and connections between workflows. At the core of this project was a data restructure, so we then had to take the current workflows and re-map them to a new data process.
Building out a design system
“I don't think this can be a deck"
The original project plan was to be working in-step with the local FedEx development team who was leading implementation. However, that team quickly got bogged down by technical constraints and ours needed to keep going. I suggested that we change our approach and focus on building out a design system that could partner with the data restructuring work rather than building page by page.
In addition to delivering components, I also built out a custom design system wiki including things like code snippets and rules for use for specific types of content
“With these new designs, new-user training would drop from 2 years down to 2 months”
Valencia Davis, FedEx Subject Matter Expert