Igloo Software • Manager of UX • 5 min
Designing Igloo Flex: Modernizing a Legacy Enterprise Platform to Scale
Confidentiality notice
This work is from my time at Igloo Software. I’ve generalized customer data and internal details so the focus stays on the platform, the system and the results.
Challenge
Igloo’s legacy intranet had become fragmented and inconsistent. It was hard to scale, and people had to work through complicated workflows that took real effort to learn.
Strategy
We stopped designing one-off solutions and built shared patterns instead, so every team was building on the same foundation.
Results
Flex ended up with a foundation that could scale. The experience got more consistent, and teams could build on it more predictably.
Challenge
Modernizing a legacy platform without disrupting customers
Over the years, different teams had added their own patterns and workflows to Igloo’s platform. The result was an experience that felt inconsistent to customers and was hard for us to maintain.
Basic tasks were harder than they should have been. People often needed training to do simple things, and the lack of clear hierarchy made navigation confusing.
The product had also picked up a lot of edge cases. Something that started out flexible had become harder to use, harder to scale and harder to change.
Meanwhile, customers expected enterprise tools to feel more modern and connected. Small fixes weren’t going to get us there. We needed to fix how the product was put together underneath, not just how individual screens looked.
Strategy
Rebuilding the foundation
with a design system
We moved from designing features one at a time to building a system that could work across teams and use cases.
We started with the workflows most people relied on and cut complexity by agreeing on shared patterns and behaviours. That made the product more consistent and meant teams stopped reinventing the same solutions.
A big part of that was building the foundation of a reusable design system. It sped up the work, cut duplication and made the experience more predictable across the platform.
We also tied design decisions more closely to what we were learning from customers, so what we built came from real usage and feedback.
The goal was a foundation that could grow with the product without sliding back into fragmentation.
Results
A foundation for the next version of the platform
As shared patterns replaced one-off solutions, Flex became more consistent and easier to scale. Teams started relying on the design system, which cut down on guesswork and made implementation more predictable.
That kept a lot of the old inconsistencies from creeping back in, and teams could build faster and with more confidence.
Flex became the foundation for Igloo’s modern intranet.
Platform modernization
Igloo Flex
Modernized Igloo’s legacy intranet and laid the groundwork for Igloo Flex
Adoption
325+
Used by 325+ organizations, including Hard Rock Cafe and other global enterprise customers
Scale
1M+
Used by more than 1 million people across distributed enterprise workforces
Efficiency
50%
Cut design time by 50% by building the foundation of the design system and getting teams to use it
Retention
97%
97% customer retention across enterprise clients
UX Research
0 to 1
Created Lighthouse, Igloo’s UX research program, to bring real user insight into product decisions
Emerging tech
AI
As Manager of UX, I worked with Product to ship two AI features: a page builder that builds a full page from a prompt, and AI search. I was still very much in the design work.
Delivery
Platform
Gave multiple teams one shared way to design and deliver consistently
Lessons
What I took from it
Most of the problems we saw on screen came from how the product was put together underneath. Fixing them meant agreeing on shared patterns first and redesigning screens second.
A design system only pays off when teams actually use it. The 50% drop in design time came from adoption, so a lot of my time went into design reviews and helping teams build with it, not only into making components.
Shared patterns had to be defended after launch. Without someone watching for new one-off solutions, the old fragmentation would have come back.
Starting with the workflows most people used every day gave us the biggest improvement for the effort, and gave the system a clear place to start.
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