Desktop Smart Client

The client is a leading provider of portfolio management and accounting solutions to global institutional investors. They offer a portfolio accounting system with comprehensive accounting capabilities to meet the needs of today’s global investors.

How We Helped

This project was a re-engineering of a massive legacy application to a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop client. We helped develop wireframes and design UI concepts to accomodate a tremendous amount of functionality, as well as actual frontend implementation.

As a line-of-business application used daily by office workers, there were steep requirements for usability, UI performance, and overall productivity. At the same time, product management wanted to demonstrate the powerful visual and motion graphics capabilities of WPF. We achieved these goals by understanding how users worked with the legacy application, identifying areas for improvement, and then designed new interfaces and workflows to meet those needs. For example, we significantly reduced the number of screens and clicks required to complete a task, while introducing subtle but meaningful animations and visual cues along the way.

Our software architect played a key role in developing the frontend UI architecture that served as a foundation for the rest of the application. From an infrastructure perspective, this included a loosely coupled MVP architecture, application shell services, command handling, event brokering, validation, and unit testing capabilities. On the UI side, we developed a skinnable interface and a rich suite of custom UI controls.