Econet Editora · 2018
I worked as a Product Designer supporting the product teams (Product Owners, development and project management) in optimizing interfaces and renewing the identity of Econet’s digital products. The role combined user-centered design with execution under Lean UX methodology, covering everything from research and benchmarking to creating the design pattern, redesigning existing products, and specifying microinteractions.
The tension was between scale and coherence: a digital product ecosystem that had grown without a shared visual or experience standard. Different visual identities, inconsistent flows and communication without a unified voice fragmented brand perception and created unnecessary cognitive effort for users moving between tools.
The challenge was to modernize and unify what already existed, without starting from scratch. Econet already had a strong market reference in the tax and fiscal domain; what was missing was a design foundation to make that show from the outside. The solution called for a systemic approach, rather than a sequence of isolated redesigns.
The approach was structured around Lean UX, with short design-and-validation cycles in close collaboration with the product and development teams. The starting point was immersion in the domain: understanding tax and fiscal complexity and how it translates into the real needs of the tools’ users.
Proto-personas built from the behaviors and opinions of customers close to the internal teams guided design decisions. Market benchmarking identified references both within the niche and in design-system methodologies applied by technology companies.
Question: Who are the users of Econet’s tools, and what are their core behaviors and needs?
What was done: Construction of proto-personas based on the behaviors and opinions of a group of customers close to the internal team, professionals in direct contact with the tools’ users.
Key finding: Users deal with highly complex technical information and frequently perform repetitive actions. Reducing cognitive effort and visual clarity mattered more than aesthetic sophistication.
Artifact: Proto-personas with behavioral profiles and core needs by user type.
Question: How are similar companies, or those with advanced design methodologies, structuring their products and design systems?
What was done: In-depth analysis of competitors and companies in adjacent niches that use user-centered design and mature design systems. Focus on interface patterns for productivity tools and complex B2B products.
Key finding: Products with an established design system show greater perceived consistency and a shorter learning curve between tools. Neutral palettes with clear hierarchy work best in high information-density interfaces.
Artifact: Market reference analysis with applications to the Econet context.
Problem: Desktop dashboards with unclear visual hierarchy, making it harder to read data and make decisions in query and analysis tools.
Design decision: Redesign of the dashboard interfaces to optimize readability, reduce cognitive effort, ease decision-making and make the interfaces more appealing, without sacrificing the information density required by the tax domain.
Problem: Products with disconnected names and visual identities, with no shared language to reinforce Econet’s positioning as an integrated ecosystem.
Design decision: Development of a new identity language for the products, unifying and updating the brands. Started studies for new names for some products, seeking greater coherence with the company’s positioning.
Problem: Each product used colors and fonts independently, with no system. The perception of fragmentation started at the most basic layer of the visual identity.
Design decision: New color palette based on Econet’s institutional colors, enriched with variations and gradients for lighter, more modern interfaces. Roboto typeface, paired with Material Design principles, to ensure versatility, legibility and consistent visual hierarchy. Icon family created to be coherent with the design pattern and adaptable to each product’s needs.
Problem: With no shared standard, each product made independent decisions on buttons, spacing, states and interactions, multiplying rework and making maintenance expensive.
Design decision: Started a design pattern covering button styles, typography and color palette, adaptable to each product’s needs but with a common base. A structure that works both as a visual library and as a code reference for the development team.
Problem: Existing products with flows that hadn’t evolved alongside user needs: friction points in repetitive actions and menu hierarchies with no orientation toward the main tasks.
Design decision: Redesigned the products with a focus on: shortcuts for frequent actions, prominent CTAs, simplified menu hierarchies, and reduced cognitive effort in repetitive actions. Each redesign started from an analysis of the tools’ actual usage patterns.
Problem: Static interfaces with no visual feedback for user actions created uncertainty, especially in operations involving fiscal data processing.
Design decision: Specified animations for interface elements to communicate loading states, file validation and context changes. Focus on reducing cognitive overload and improving the perception of system responsiveness.
Unifying the design system established a foundation to launch new products with coherent identity, without rebuilding patterns from scratch for every initiative.
A shared design pattern reduced redundant decisions across teams, both in maintaining existing products and in developing new features.
Modernized interfaces with a unified visual language reinforced Econet’s positioning as a company that invests in technology and design to deliver high-quality solutions in the tax domain.
It started as a redesign and quickly became a systematization problem. Most of the value didn’t come from the screens modernized one by one, but from the design infrastructure (reusable patterns, palettes, components) that sustained consistency over the long run. The tax and fiscal domain demanded deep immersion: translating dense technical requirements into accessible interfaces without oversimplifying. The margin between clarity and loss of precision was narrow, and every decision had to justify itself within that tension.
The design pattern started here was the longest-lasting contribution. It standardized what already existed and, more than that, created a language that later designers and developers could use without rebuilding decisions already made. The reusable pattern kept paying off long after the screens from that period had already been replaced.
I’d build the design system more modularly, prioritizing the most frequently used components in the more mature products before expanding to products at MVP stage. I’d also formalize the “done” criteria for each pattern earlier, reducing ambiguity during handoff.