Enterprise SaaS Product Migration
London Stock Exchange / Yield Book
PROJECT SUMMARY
Prior to 2020, Yield Book offered a SaaS application called Yield Book Calculator, for performing risk analytics on individual fixed income securities. The application was Flash-based.
I had joined Yield Book in 2016 as the lone designer in an agile development team working on a suite of applications that included Single Security Calculator (SSC), a newer web-based tool for performing the same types of analytics, but with very limited functionality.
Beginning in January 2020, the team had less than one year before Flash end-of-life to...
- Expand functionality in SSC to reach minimum feature and data parity with the legacy Flash-based Yield Book Calculator product
- Update SSC UI components and layouts to support new functionality and to utilize consistent styling and interaction design
- Migrate legacy product user base of XX client companies and XXX average monthly active users, representing $XM in annual revenue
...with no downtime and minimal disruption to users.
My Role
UX Strategy
- Defined template-based approach to UI variations across calculation types and security types
Interaction & Visual Design
- Defined responsive template layouts and sets of common components
- Based on existing styles, defined a cohesive design system / visual language for UI components, layouts/spacing, data visualizations, typography, color palette, etc.
- Designed multiple new types of line charts, combo line/area charts, bar charts and tabular data displays
- Designed or redesigned analysis input forms and output charts/tables for 5 calculation types and ~50 different security types, consisting of dozens of page variations and hundreds of component variations
Business/Data Analysis
- Conducted analyses of legacy product to identify and document variations by security type in underlying security data, calculation features, UI components, and calculation outputs
- Identified sample security IDs by type and by various subtypes for QA testing
Outcomes
- Project completed ahead of schedule, meeting all major feature requirements
- 100% client and usage retention, maintaining existing revenue
- Added XX individual user licenses in 6 months following launch, resulting in additional annual revenue of $XXXK
PROJECT DETAILS
In September 2019, Adobe announced the end of Flash Player support as of December 31, 2020, and Microsoft announced the removal of Flash Player in all browser updates after that same date.
At that time, Yield Book's primary analytics tool for individual fixed income securities was Yield Book Calculator, a Flash-based application with two main sets of features:
- Indicative Data (deal structure and collateral data)
- Security Analytics (various types of risk analytics calculations)
In January 2020, the product team I was on at Yield Book began a project to migrate users from Yield Book Calculator to a newer Single Security Calculator within the Yield Book Q (YBQ) product suite.
Project goals
- Maintain customer base and revenue
- Expand/update SSC to achieve feature/data parity with legacy product
- Migrate users to SSC before Flash EOL, with no downtime and minimal disruption
Core project team
- Product manager
- Designer (me)
- Front-end development lead
- Four front-end developers
Support teams and stakeholders
- Subject matter experts from sales and customer support
- API and back-end development teams
- Public website team (landing page, SSO login)
Pre-Project State
Pre-project: Price/Yield calculations (legacy Calculator and SSC)
Pre-project: Scenario calculations (legacy Calculator only)
Pre-project: other calculation types (legacy Calculator only)
Pre-project feature comparison: legacy Calculator and SSC
Additional Context
Design Constraints
Most of the design constraints were fairly typical...
- Add no new features beyond parity with legacy product
- Use existing YBQ UI components whenever possible
- Minimize development effort
- Use a small number of page templates
One constraint was somewhat unusual...
- Don’t alert clients to legacy product EOL
Design Research and Validation
This final constrain precluded conducting many types of direct client research, but throughout the project we had other sources of information and feedback, including...
- PM and stakeholder industry knowledge
- Log files to understand usage of legacy product
- Internal review of designs and interactive prototypes
- Previous research conducted by the product consultancy that did initial YBQ design and development
Utilizing these resources, we were able to make informed decisions about security type and calculation type prioritization, legacy Calculator features that could be excluded from the migration, and other design considerations.
Single Security Calculator Enhancements
Early Explorations
SSC enhancements - early explorations
Final Designs - Initial Release
SSC enhancements - basic Pricing Parameters
SSC enhancements - Prepayment Model Projections
SSC enhancements - Scenario calculation inputs (initial release)
SSC enhancements - Scenario calculation outputs
SSC enhancements - WAL Sensitivity calculation inputs and outputs
SSC enhancements - CMBS PY calculation inputs and outputs
Development Team Support
Throughout the project, I maintained spreadsheet lists of UI variations and sample securities for testing.
SSC UI variations
SSC sample securities
Feedback and Subsequent Enhancements
In the initial release, the Scenario calculations utilized a dropdown (see above) to select market scenarios users could define in a separate Scenario Builder module (not shown) that already existed as part of YBQ.
Following user feedback that the Scenario Builder module (which was designed primarily for portfolio analysis) was too complex for single security analysis, we built a separate SSC Scenario Builder as part of the in-page Scenario calculation inputs...
SSC enhancements - Scenario Builder as part of Scenario calculation inputs
Project Outcomes
- Project completed ahead of schedule, meeting all major feature requirements
- 100% client and usage retention, maintaining existing revenue
- Added XX individual user licenses in 6 months following launch, resulting in additional annual revenue of $XXXK
