Enterprise Product & Rebrand · 2018 to 2022
A legacy platform made simple, accessible and ready to scale.
Transforming a legacy EDI platform into a scalable, accessible SaaS product.
Role
Sole Product Designer
Clients
DPD, Radley, Tangle Teezer, NHS Supply Chain
Outcome
Silverlight replaced, white-labelled twice
Standards
EDI, PEPPOL
Setting the Scene
When I joined NetEDI, I inherited NetIX: a platform the whole business depended on every day, that had very much outgrown what it was built on. It ran in Microsoft Silverlight, and it was outdated, visually inconsistent, and hard to find your way around.
I was the only designer on it. The product was deeply technical and used every day by clients including DPD, Radley, Tangle Teezer and NHS Supply Chain.
The goal was to modernise the interface and improve usability for both technical and non-technical users, without disrupting hundreds of live customer integrations.
Part One
Modernising NetIX
Problem
The legacy platform was functional but inefficient and difficult to use. It looked and behaved like a system designed for engineers, not for people managing business operations.
- Complex terminology and poor hierarchy
- Minimal validation, feedback or error handling
- Inconsistent layouts and navigation
- No scalability for tablet or desktop responsiveness
Process
I began by mapping every workflow, from document processing to profile setup and error resolution. I interviewed support and engineering teams to understand friction points and identify which workarounds had become “standard practice.”
That meant getting enough grasp of the technical standards underneath, including EDI and PEPPOL, the e-procurement standard behind public sector buying. Most of that work happened out of sight: for NHS Supply Chain in particular, the complexity sat in what the system was doing behind the scenes rather than anything a person would see. I needed to understand it well enough to design one service that worked for everyone using it, rather than something that only made sense if you already knew how it worked.
From there, I designed new structures for:
- Dashboards showing live order and invoice volumes at a glance
- Editor and process screens simplified for data entry and validation
- Document overviews with clear state, buyer and seller visibility
- Reusable tables with filtering and inline actions
I built it as modules rather than pages, so the same pieces worked at any screen size and a mistake was harder to make in the first place.
Outcome
The new NetIX interface replaced Silverlight with a modern, modular design system.
The feedback was about how it looked and how easy it had become. On a system people had been stuck with for years, that was the point.
“I like the status column as it is really easy to see files processing.”
“Looks 100 times better and is a lot easier to use.”
“A better platform from a technology and compatibility point of view.”
“More user-friendly. Looks very good, easy on the eye.”
Part Two
White-Labelling NetIX
Context
I had designed NetIX with future rebrands in mind, and that turned out to matter sooner than I expected. Because the structure and the components were consistent, the platform could carry somebody else’s identity without being rebuilt.
IKEA Restaurants
NetEDI were bidding for IKEA Restaurants, and I produced a partial rebrand of NetIX in their brand inside a week, so the bid could show the platform as their own tool rather than as somebody else’s product.
La-Z-Boy
La-Z-Boy had been using the new NetIX interface for a while, and asked for the service to be rebranded for their in-house team to use. I worked to their brand guidelines, liaising with their Management and Marketing Teams, and it took a month.
The loop was short because the components were consistent, so a rebrand meant restyling a system rather than redrawing every screen. I would post the rebranded screens in Slack, they went out for approval, and then they were coded. Days, rather than sprints.
The edge it gave us
Being able to do this gave NetEDI something to sell. In a bid we could show a prospect the platform already wearing their brand, which is a different conversation from asking them to imagine it. For a client already using it, we could hand over something that looked like their own tool rather than somebody else’s software.
Two brands, one in a week and one in a month, on a platform that had been a Silverlight application when I arrived. The speed came from the structure underneath, which had been built for this before anybody asked for it.
Part Three
Post-Acquisition Rebrand
Context
In late 2019, NetEDI was acquired by Cegedim Group, a SaaS provider based in France. NetIX became part of Cegedim’s wider ecosystem, and I was asked to align the product with their Sy platform branding.
By then I had rebranded NetIX twice, so the mechanics were not the hard part. The hard part was that several colours in the parent company’s palette did not meet WCAG 2.1 AA contrast ratios.
Challenges
- Redesigning a product that had just launched
- Balancing brand consistency with accessibility and usability
- Raising WCAG 2.1 AA contrast failures in the parent company’s palette, and finding a way forward when the decision was to proceed
- Coordinating implementation between engineering teams in the UK, France and Egypt
- Introducing the first structured design tokens and variables into a legacy CSS codebase
Process
I reviewed Cegedim’s brand library, compared colour and typography systems, and ran accessibility testing across all proposed palettes. Several of the mid-range colours failed WCAG 2.1 AA contrast ratios, so I documented the specific values, tested alternatives, and raised it in writing with both NetEDI and Cegedim before anything was implemented.
The decision was to proceed with the parent company’s palette. That left me with a choice about what to do with the concern, and I took the pragmatic route: if the brand colours were fixed, I could still control how consistently everything else was built. I standardised UI components and layouts to form the foundation of a shared design system, mapping tokens between Figma and CSS, so that contrast decisions lived in one place and could be corrected later without rebuilding the interface.
I planned updates in Jira, sketched rebranded dashboards, and validated designs through prototypes before any implementation began.
I travelled to France to work on-site with Cegedim’s stakeholders and developers, reviewing accessibility adjustments, sitting with the French Marketing Team, and presenting progress to executive sponsors.
Outcome
The rebrand delivered a unified interface that preserved NetIX’s usability while aligning it with Cegedim’s broader SaaS suite.
- Introduced consistent visual hierarchy and colour usage
- Established structured colour tokens and typography scales, mapped between Figma and the CSS and shipped in code, so contrast could be corrected centrally rather than screen by screen
Reflection
I had full ownership of this one, from research through to system-level design, with nobody else to hand the hard decisions to.
Working on-site with Cegedim in France was the first time I had designed across two languages, and across two companies that had only just been joined together.
What NetIX left behind was a platform that could take a new partner without anybody rebuilding the setup logic, and one that could be wearing a prospect’s brand inside a week.
“I managed Jade at NetEDI and she quickly proved herself as a great designer. She turns complex workflows into simple, reliable journeys and balances strong product thinking with the detail needed to ship.
Jade proactively sought feedback, worked brilliantly with engineering and ops, and kept user needs at the centre of every decision. When the NeTIX redesign was launched we got much positive feedback from our key brands.”
Let’s improve something together.
Open to part-time roles and fractional contracts, two to three days a week.