When hired as a Consultant for Lexxic on their Internal/External facing systems, the team I joined was a fully formed team. That team had an idea of how they wanted to do things, and no time to restart, even though that would have been a very suitable approach. My role as Consultant was working with the team to bring the perspective of people who used this website to colour ideas that were at that stage well-formed and deep-rooted.
Moving beyond the idea that I should tell my collaborators in the team that their work had to be rebooted, my approach was to triage the backlog and look at the places where the User Experience could improve.
In this way each ticket a chance to bring the team on a journey using small, incremental changes to redefine the products.
The totality of those changes was significant, and the products were remade around the user's journeys, but that change was introduced step by step with evidence from interviews, and a set of tested paths through the product that highlighted pain points and how to avoid them. Large structural changes were made, but without a reboot, or a relaunch.
Indeed, the visual language that Stakeholders had approved was honoured while being evolved. Working within that language I was able to add elements which focused on utility for users, presented gradual change with the team, empowering everyone to bring suggestions to the User Experience design.
Arriving later in the project is difficult, and working with an established team is a challenge, but it is one to be approached with a sense of empathy and understanding that people are committed to the work they have done. Incrementally improving the project while I took colleagues on the design journey to a better User Experience far more effectively than throwing out the old design they had worked on away, and starting again.
