Case study – Application UX & platform redesign
Legacy Studios
A full redesign of a school photography platform – replacing a costly proprietary vendor system with an open-source application that improved UX, slashed support costs, and scaled to military academies.
The challenge
A platform held hostage by its own vendor
Legacy Studios – a school photography company serving thousands of families annually – was locked into a costly proprietary vendor architecture for their photo-processing and ordering system. The platform was expensive to run, difficult to maintain, and delivered a poor experience for both parents and staff. Help desk call volume was high, checkout was clunky, and the vendor dependency left no room to evolve the product.
As the lead at Mahalo Media Group, I was brought in to redesign all web properties and replace the backend photo-processing application – eliminating vendor lock-in while improving the end-to-end user experience.
My approach
Open source, better UX, same brand trust
Migrate off proprietary vendor architecture to open source – eliminating dependency, reducing cost, and restoring control.
Redesign the parent checkout flow around real user behavior – parents viewing and purchasing school photos needed it to be fast and frictionless.
Build an iPad kiosk checkout so parents could browse and purchase on portrait day itself – a completely new touchpoint.
I managed the full engagement – client relationships, budget, and a cross-functional team of PMs, developers, designers, SEO specialists, and copywriters – with hands-on involvement wherever the work demanded it. The goal was a platform that could be replicated across multiple brands and clients without rebuilding from scratch each time.
The work
Platform & properties delivered
Primary platform
Early childhood
Annapolis, MD
West Point, NY
Results
A platform that paid for itself many times over
Increase in profitability post-launch
Reduction in help desk call volume
Platform reused across brands including West Point & Annapolis
The 90% reduction in help desk calls was the clearest signal that the UX redesign worked – parents could complete the checkout flow without needing support. The platform’s reusability across military academies and sister brands validated the open-source architecture decision and extended the return on investment well beyond the initial project scope.
What I learned
Good UX reduces the need for support
A 90% drop in help desk calls isn’t a support metric – it’s a UX metric. It meant that parents, many of them non-technical and time-pressed, could navigate the platform confidently on their own. That outcome reinforced something I now apply to every project: the best measure of a usable interface is how rarely people need to ask for help using it.
Managing a cross-functional team through a complex platform migration also sharpened my ability to hold the user experience vision while balancing technical constraints, client expectations, and budget realities simultaneously.
