Web App Redesign for EdTech SaaS Solutions Provider
6
Months to a working MVP
Delivered on time and on budget, helping the client secure an important state contract.
5
Months of research and design
User research and design work ahead of the build.
20
Years on the market
The age of the product being mapped and redesigned.
The client
A US-based educational technology SaaS provider with more than a dozen products. One of its core platforms had been on the market for two decades and needed both its interface and its technology stack renewed to keep its users.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
Three problems arrived together: an interface losing deals, reporting that could not bend, and a stack that cost too much to keep alive.
Challenge 01Contracts lost on the interface
A competitor with a better UI had already taken business, and a major state contract was coming up — so an MVP with an upgraded interface was urgent.
Challenge 02Reporting rules that differ by state
Reports needed to be flexible and customisable because every US state sets its own rules, and each new requirement had been triggering ad hoc development.
Challenge 03A stack eating the margin
The Microsoft-based stack required a top-tier SQL licence and more maintenance attention than any other product in the portfolio, which pushed net profit per user down.
What we did
Twenty years of product, mapped before anything was moved
A product designer investigated the existing platform and identified the key user journeys and the difference between critical and nice-to-have, while a user researcher interviewed users about behaviours, needs and pain points.
What is here, and who uses it
Detailed features of a twenty-year-old product were mapped, every type of end user identified, and goals and use cases defined for each of them.
Simpler, and built to scale
The platform was redesigned from the user’s perspective against both current functional requirements and future scalability, balancing user needs against business ones and meeting WCAG 2.1 level AA.
Off Microsoft, onto open source
The application base moved away from ASP, .NET and MSSQL to a modern open-source stack, with security held at OWASP levels and privacy maintained.
Centralised, through their own BI
Reporting was centralised on the client’s enterprise BI platform, the number of roles in the system reduced, and users taught how to work the new solution.
Tech stackThe tools that made it possible
01
Node.js
The backend replacing the .NET and stored-procedure setup.
02
Vue
The frontend of the rebuilt, responsive multi-tenant application.
03
Enterprise BI
The client’s own platform, now carrying centralised reporting.
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What’s next