Overview
Xero's Contacts product was one of the platform's oldest and most heavily used modules – and it showed. Built on legacy architecture, it had accumulated years of technical debt and UX debt in equal measure. Customers used it daily, which made the risk of disruption high and the need for care even higher.
As Senior Product Designer, I led the design of the full re-platform – from early discovery through to post-launch validation – while also contributing to Xero's evolving design system to ensure the new Contacts experience felt coherent across the broader product.
The challenge
Modernising a legacy product without disrupting the thousands of small businesses that relied on it every day is a genuinely hard design problem. The challenge wasn't just visual – the underlying data model was changing, which meant some workflows would behave differently. Customers who had built muscle memory around the old product needed to feel confident in the new one, fast.
On top of this, the project was a significant engineering undertaking. Design had to stay ahead of development while remaining flexible enough to adapt as constraints emerged. Close, continuous collaboration with engineering wasn't a nice-to-have – it was essential.
"The goal wasn't to make Contacts look new. It was to make it feel like we finally understood how customers actually used it."
My approach
Deep customer research
Ran a series of in-depth customer interviews to understand how different user types – sole traders, accountants, bookkeepers – used Contacts in their daily workflows. The variety of use cases was wider than expected, which shaped our prioritisation significantly.
Workflow mapping & gap analysis
Mapped every current workflow against the planned new architecture to identify where the experience would change materially. This produced a clear risk register and a set of design principles specifically for handling moments of disruption.
Design system integration
Worked with the design systems team to ensure Contacts would be one of the first products to fully adopt Xero's updated design language. This meant close collaboration on component design – in some cases, contributing new patterns back to the system.
Iterative prototyping & testing
Built mid-fidelity prototypes for each major workflow and ran usability testing at multiple stages. Testing with power users – particularly bookkeepers – was especially valuable, as they revealed edge cases that simpler test scenarios missed.
Staged rollout & feedback loops
Worked with Product to design a staged rollout strategy that allowed customers to opt in early. This gave us a live feedback loop pre-launch and let us catch and fix issues before they affected the full user base.
Outcomes
The launch was one of the smoothest major product changes in recent Xero history – a reflection of the care taken in the design process.
What I learned
Legacy re-platforms are as much about organisational trust as they are about design craft. The 98% positive feedback wasn't just a design outcome – it reflected months of cross-functional alignment, careful risk management and a rollout strategy that gave customers agency over their own transition.
Contributing new patterns back to the design system was also a highlight. It pushed me to think about components at a level of abstraction beyond the immediate product context – and the result benefited teams across Xero, not just Contacts.