Modern and accessible ITSM design

Initial company and product state

Initial company state

Cherwell had a strong and loyal customer base, but was far beyond its ITSM competitors such as ServiceNow and Ivanti.

Initial product state

Cherwell had never had a designer, so the enterprise application had a high learning curve, and it was difficult to understand what to pay attention to. Following the redesign, Cherwell was acquired by Ivanti.

Old design

Challenge

The legacy client UI overwhelmed users with cluttered layouts, red alerts everywhere, unlabeled icons, inconsistent design, and forms that were long, confusing, and not accessible. Time-on-task was high and errors were frequent. The UI failed Section 508/WCAG standards, which were a new company imperative.

Approach

• Performed competitive analysis and customer interviews to understand workflows.
• Redesigned UI using clear hierarchy, consistent iconography, and modern form patterns.
• Introduced tabs, task bars, left-justified forms, and context-specific actions.
• Added required-field indicators, simplified form structure, and reduced color overload.
• Ensured full Section 508/WCAG compliance.
• Because icon sets did not cover what we needed at the time, I created most iconography.

New design

The new design provided universal navigation and search, action toolbars, all related tasks into one sidebar, bringing information forward, like status, next step, details. Note: Ignore the red line - it was a branding effort that was soon removed, thankfully!

Accessibility

All object forms, such as the problem object shown here, were redesigned to ensure that everything met WCAG and 508 requirements.

Impact

• The new web-based ITSM interface significantly reduced cognitive load and made problem and incident management far more efficient.
• Accessibility compliance opened the product to a broader customer base
• Strongly positioned Cherwell for acquisition, which happened shortly after I left the company, when Cherwell was acquired by Ivanti.