Introduction

Digital forensic tools helps law enforcement agencies to analyze digital devices such as computers, mobile phones and network communications, recover materials from them to investigate cybercrimes. One of our clients is a global leader in providing solutions for these purposes and they provide stand-alone and enterprise-class solutions for more than 130,000 end-users who are employees of government agencies, corporations, law firms etc. Our customer’s products assist both criminal and civil investigations which include legal reviews, compliance, auditing etc.

Despite the highly sensitive nature of their industry and a huge number of customers, they had legacy systems that were in the dire need of modernization. Their applications were highly sophisticated, but the interface was unimpressive and did not meet the latest UX standards. Due to these issues, they were struggling to meet end-user expectations in the market and were desperate to completely revamp the user interface and branding across their product site. They wanted all these done within 6 months without any regressions. But the problem was their legacy application had evolved for over three years which imparted unwanted complexities in architecture and functionalities. Aspire had to overcome this issue carefully without affecting the application. Aspire’s expertise in replatforming and rearchitecturing helped this client steamline their workflow and improve their application’s performance by 40%.

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UI Modernization Trends

Applications must have dynamic interfaces and great functionalities to provide better user experiences. Modernizing their current product interfaces with the cutting edge technologies and best practices will give organizations the leeway to respond well to the escalating demand from their customers. Usability and experience are the main factors that decide the quality of user interfaces and modernization of the graphical user interface and application can make a difference.

MicroFront Ends: Organizations with high levels of modernization maturity use Microfront Ends that are nothing but small applications with multiple functionalities working in concert to deliver a large application. Large applications usually have lot of sections and features developed and maintained by different teams. They might be fully developed or being built with every new releases. These applications need Microfront Ends. Simpler and smaller applications on the other hand can be implemented using frameworks like Angular.

Client Server and JSP/ASP.Net Apps: On the opposite end of the spectrum, websites that are run from the client’s server are simple and have very few functions. They are not secure and usually unreliable. Server side languages like Java Server Pages (JSP) and Active Server Pages (ASP) help developers to build dynamic web pages. Hosted on the cloud, the user interfaces on these websites are on a level that is above client server application, but they still rank below PWAs and SPAs. They are built using JavaScript based open-source frontend web frameworks such as AngularJS.

PWAs and SPAs: Next to JSP/ASP.Net web applications are Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) and Single Page Applications (SPAs) that are built using HTML, Javascript and other common web technologies. They bring native app-like user experience to cross platform applications. They use Angular which is a Javascript framework that helps developers to build front end web applications that engage well with users. While PWAs are usually intended to work on mobile devices and sometimes desktops, SPA’s goal is to execute faster transitions and improve optimization. Legacy applications that are lightweight in nature use Angular, React, PWAs and ReactNative to build their frontends while microservices used microfront ends for compatibility.

Aspire’s Solution

Since the end-user experience was not up to current UX standards, we realized that the workflows had to be simplified and new better features added for the end-users. We re-developed the Legacy Silverlight application screen and AngularJS screens in Angular 9 framework. We also implemented the component-based approach to enable reusability as much as possible across the application. This approach defines the components in a central place and calls it whenever needed. Our UI/UX team worked with the customer’s team to understand their challenges and developed brand new user experience designs. We were able to develop, launch, and distribute a minimum viable product (MVP) to the client’s end user within 3 months’ time. This is half the time fixed by the client to finish the project. The development teams from both the sides are currently developing a unified web application from scratch on more recent versions of .Net and Angular stack.

Benefits reaped

The application’s performance turned out to be much better than the legacy application. Here are the most striking benefits of this UI modernization.

  • Developed a unified web application from scratch on more recent versions of .Net and Angular stack
  • Increase in application performance by 40% compared to legacy system
  • Simplified workflow and easy navigation throughout the website
  • Reduced the time-to-market from 6 months to 3 months
  • Reduced development efforts by 40%

Read to improve your application’s UI? Learn how Aspire’s expertise on UI modernization can transform your business.

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