Maxiplan
Maxiplan is a leading financial planning and corporate performance management platform used by large enterprises in Brazil. Designed for budgeting, forecasting, and results tracking, it supports complex planning workflows across financial, operational, and strategic teams.
As the system matured and expanded, the need for better usability, clearer interaction flows, and scalable UI structure became critical, especially given its widespread use by non-technical users in finance departments.
Context
Maxiplan’s interface had grown organically, resulting in inconsistencies across modules, overloaded screens, and steep learning curves for new users. The product team needed to improve both adoption and usage efficiency, particularly in companies where Maxiplan was the backbone of annual budget cycles, rolling forecasts, and KPI tracking.
The redesign was also an opportunity to standardize components, prepare the platform for future feature scaling, and increase internal team autonomy with a better design system.
My Role
As Design Lead, I was responsible for:
- Structuring the product redesign around key business goals and platform scalability
- Building a flexible design system that respected engineering constraints and legacy tech
- Working closely with product and engineering to align interface rollout with business strategy
Key Challenges
- Reducing friction in workflows used by finance teams with varying technical backgrounds
- Unifying the experience across modules that had been developed independently over time
- Preserving flexibility while simplifying key interactions
Approach & Strategy
The strategy focused on consistency, discoverability, and interaction clarity:
- Component rationalization: Consolidated UI patterns for input fields, tables, filters, and menus
- Progressive disclosure: Restructured flows to reduce cognitive load by exposing only necessary options
- Information hierarchy: Clarified screen layouts with stronger visual cues, spacing, and contextual grouping
- Design system foundation: Built a shared component library to speed up iteration and reduce maintenance
Key Learnings
- Designing for expert users doesn’t mean tolerating poor UX, clarity improves performance at every level.
- A strong design system is critical in complex enterprise software, not just for visual polish, but for product governance.
- Collaboration between design, product, and engineering must be tight to modernize legacy systems without breaking business continuity.
Final Thoughts
Maxiplan was a high-impact project where UX had to serve complexity without becoming complicated. The redesign helped reposition the platform as not only functionally powerful, but also accessible, scalable, and ready for the future.
More than visual improvement, it was a strategic move to create alignment, reduce onboarding time, and equip the product team with tools to evolve faster and with more confidence.
