How To Modernize Legacy UX (without breaking everything)

Portrait of Vitaly Friedman, founder and UX coach, trainer for How To Modernize Legacy UX

Vitaly Friedman

Founder & UX Coach

More about Vitaly →

About this workshop

Learn how to untangle and overhaul legacy UX — modernize, migrate and eventually sunset it, without breaking the product along the way.

Dealing with legacy feels like fighting windmills. It's exhausting, frustrating, and usually going nowhere. It doesn't just slow you down. It creeps into every decision, blocks good ideas, drains effort and leaves little to show for it. How do you ship good work when the system itself is working against you?

You'll cover
  • Hard truths about legacy, why it persists, hard to replace
  • Systems thinking, how to use it to untangle legacy
  • Five legacy migration strategies, how to choose the right one
  • Feature parity vs. outcome parity, when to innovate vs. replicate
  • Frankenstein dilemma: what to migrate, carry forward and cut
  • “Big bang” vs. incremental rollout, why both are dangerous traps
  • Mitigate risks of big failures, unknown unknowns, “Black Swans”
  • Modernization strategy: UX facades, off-ramp, the strangler fig
  • Migration UX for data, workflows, mental models, long-standing habits
  • Legacy UX research: methods that work, how to use them

Training: How To Modernize Legacy UX

16–18 Nov 2026Online

3 live lessons · 15:30 – 18:00 CET

Early Bird

€449

+ VAT

Regular

€499

+ VAT

Late Bird

€549

+ VAT

Just launched – save with a limited Early Bird!

Get your seat →

More dates and locations

What you'll learn

You'll walk away with a powerful toolbox of techniques and real-world examples to apply to your projects, products, or apps.

What attendees say

Very thought provoking and insightful course with a massive collection of reference material included.
VincentHead of Design at Hacon
As a UX/UI designer that lives and breathes in legacy, this course was not only helpful, but also very validating. There is some comfort knowing the pain points I deal with are not unique to just to me.
CristinaSenior UX/UI Designer at College of American Pathologists
…a masterclass in enterprise reality, offering a pragmatic playbook for tackling decade-old, business-critical software […with…] frameworks like the Strangler Fig pattern and Anti-Corruption Layers to effectively negotiate with engineers and stakeholders
CristinaDesign Lead at Cdesigns
I learned a great deal from this class, and it also validated many of my own experiences working with legacy systems. Vitaly made the online lecture easy to follow, interactive, and engaging.
MichelleUX/UI Designer at smart-me AG

Included in your ticket

Certificate of completion

to document your expertise

Live teaching

interactive sessions with time for questions

Hands-on exercises

apply what you learn during the sessions

Take-home artefacts

incl. examples & checklists

Recordings of all lessons

to revisit details anytime

Who is this workshop for?

  • Product designers and PMs in large organizations and orgs where "we can't touch that" is the default response.
  • UX Leads and Service designers who want to explore a strategy to tackle and improve legacy UX in complex environments
  • Design managers and researchers who want to move a needle with legacy systems, without breaking everything along the way

Date and time

Monday 16 to Wednesday 18 November 2026

3 lessons of 2.5 hrs

each day at 15:30 – 18:00 CET

Training location

This training takes place online as live, interactive video calls.

You'll join the sessions from wherever you are — all you need is a computer and a stable internet connection. All lessons are recorded in case you miss one.

Calendar invites and Zoom links (no registration required) are sent to you via email after you complete the registration.

A workshop by

Portrait of Vitaly Friedman, founder and UX coach, trainer for How To Modernize Legacy UX

Vitaly Friedman

Founder & UX Coach

For the last 20 years, Vitaly Friedman has been working with companies and orgs like the European Parliament, Zalando, OTTO, Marc O'Polo, Axel Springer SE, REWE, Alliander and many others to improve the UX of complex systems and intricate design challenges — but also set up UX strategy, improve internal workflows, measure UX impact and more recently design AI experiences that people actually use.

Vitaly is also the author and editor of Smashing Books, and has given several well received talks and workshops with PUSH.

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