By Laura Schlenke (opens in new tab) and Brandon Haist (opens in new tab)
Image credit: iStock
Innovating a legacy product can pose a seemingly contradicting set of goals. On the one hand, you have the benefit of an entrenched product with a loyal user base that has become day-to-day experts in their usage of the feature set. On the other, you have a need to continue to attract new users and help the product remain relevant and fresh. How do you meet the needs of current users while not alienating potential new ones (or vice versa)? How do you adapt your product to remain competitive and relevant, addressing the ever-changing needs of current users while evolving to bring in new audiences?
This conundrum is one that many of our core apps have been working through; here, we’ll focus on one specific app that has undergone several overhauls in its time as well as redesigns since its inception. Today’s offering spans a multitude of audiences, devices, and platforms and boasts millions of dedicated users.
Unfortunately, along the way this has also resulted in different codebases, feature sets, user interfaces, interactivity, and overall complexity. From a systems-wide perspective this brings about concerns with consistency, coherence, and fluid user flows across systems and devices.
Thus, our initiative has been to bring these differing experiences together using a single web codebase (with dramatically increased agility on Windows), that runs in both browser and native host. One product that meets the needs and expectations of both our current and future audiences. That sounds easy-peasy, right?
Well … not so much. Innovation comes at a cost. And while there’s a lot of different things to consider in making this effort a success, the one thing the user research team is most concerned with right now is maintaining a ‘Do No Harm’ mentality with business users who have become accustomed to our robust and security-rich enterprise product while attracting and wowing our consumer and EDU users with simplicity, delight, and modernity.
To sum it up, the team is striving to:
- Increase consistency and reduce product complexity.
- Solidify product best practices and fundamentals when combining products.
- Move all users to a fast agile codebase that delivers changes faster.
- Develop a product that is both familiar and innovative to users.
This is an ambitious set of goals that impact two of our largest endpoints and accounts for hundreds of millions of users, countless professions, and a multitude of software expectations. We recently led a variety of activities to gauge how well we’re meeting these goals, the needs and expectations of our users, and whether others across the company have words of advice from their own experiences of innovating legacy products.
Navigate the change management
We expected that users would have a lot to say about the changes and were surprised when we conducted a benchmark study and there were no ‘Wow!’ moments. We weren’t entirely sure whether this was good, okay, or bad. We want to make the transition for existing users easy and the experience familiar (do no harm). But for those facing a move to a new platform, or for entirely new users, we were not knocking their socks off with simplicity and smart UI. Rather, we’re pushing more features and complexity onto them with our new experience. Some other key observations:
- Settings continue to feel too buried, a sentiment that echoed across audiences.
- Many participants were excited by ‘new’ features already available in our product, suggesting these features were difficult to discover and/or understand.
- Several users didn’t see enough value to want to switch to “yet another new version.”
Since we’ll be introducing new technologies to those switching from older commercial versions of the product, change management will need to occur at a multitude of levels to accommodate our range of users. We also need to find ways to help users find existing features that would bring delight and help with their productivity.
As well, can we find a suitable compromise between these conflicting goals of innovating our legacy product? What mechanisms are we putting in place to drive simplicity, ensure data-driven decision making, and empower design and research to deprecate a multitude of features whether because they are rarely used and users can easily recover from their absence, are duplicative to other features, or simply remain a solution looking for a user problem?
The game has changed since this product entered the market. It was innovative at its inception, and for several versions, users applauded the addition of new features. Now, users (particularly new ones) are looking for reduced clutter and friction with products. Newer products that users love have earned loyalty despite (or maybe because of) having fewer features, not more. Younger generations are opting for tools that are simpler, faster, and work effortlessly across platforms and devices.
As the technological world continues to evolve, so too must our products. While we have a rich foundation supporting heavy duty work tasks, we must also meet the needs of our other audiences – including consumers, families, and education users. In addition, we must meet if not exceed the agility and cross-app functionality of our competitors, 24/7/365. It’s a tall order, but we believe that our deep understanding of not just what users require, but what they aspire to, will guide us there.
We anticipate that many products will be facing similar challenges to those we’re facing and hope that this article helps others to create experiences that are agile while also meeting the needs of users moving into the future.
What do you think? Does this resonate with your experience in using or updating legacy products? Tweet us your thoughts @MicrosoftRI on Twitter (opens in new tab) or join the conversation on Facebook (opens in new tab).
Laura Schlenke is a senior user researcher at Microsoft. She is experienced at leading strategy, planning and logistics for various forms of design research and usability efforts and at collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams throughout project lifecycles. Schlenke is driven by her passion to combine interpersonal communication, usability, and human advocacy to assist diverse populations.
Brandon Haist is an accomplished researcher and independent thinker. He has traveled the world in his pursuit of understanding the human psyche, in addition to holding a Masters’ degree in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Brandon has had a successful career in Design Research, being a lead researcher for two Fortune 100 tech companies – Microsoft and HP, with his expertise evident through his product recommendations and the holding of multiple patents at both companies. The lens through which Brandon sees the world is just as critical as it is insightful and refreshing.