FICO Analytic Cloud — Devlin Hazell

01 The Story

A portal serving thousands of enterprise users — still running on a design system that launched half a decade earlier.

Duration

6 Months

IRIS Adoption

100%

Year

2023

FICO Analytic Cloud (FAC) delivers a comprehensive toolkit of cloud-enabled products — spanning analytics, decision management, and optimization — through an integrated platform for building and deploying analytic applications. It's one of FICO's most operationally dense products, used by enterprise customers to orchestrate high-stakes decisioning at scale.

The customer-facing and administration portal had been running on the Horizon UI style guide for years — a legacy system with outdated colors, fonts, and component patterns. When IRIS, FICO's new design system, launched in 2020, product teams across the platform began adopting it. FAC needed dedicated design support to make that transition successfully.

The portal's visual language no longer aligned with FICO's broader product ecosystem, creating a fragmented experience for users operating across multiple tools.
Horizon components were no longer actively maintained, making it increasingly difficult for engineers to build consistent new surfaces.
The administration and customer-facing views shared patterns that needed modernization together — not in isolation.
Teams needed a designer embedded in the migration process to provide both implementation support and quality governance throughout the build.

FICO Analytic Cloud — legacy portal interface

FICO Analytic Cloud — legacy administration view

The portal before the redesign — Horizon UI components, legacy color palette, and interaction patterns inconsistent with the broader FICO platform.

“The question wasn't whether to migrate — it was how to do it without disrupting a product that enterprise customers depend on every day.”

— Sr. Designer, FICO Analytic Cloud

The approach was methodical. Rather than a single sweeping redesign, the migration happened surface by surface — each area assessed, redesigned, reviewed, and shipped before moving to the next. This allowed the engineering team to build in parallel while maintaining a stable product throughout the transition.

02 The Process

The work was focused and fast — audit the existing portal, apply IRIS, review the build. No reinvention, just a clean migration executed surface by surface.

Iteration 01

Audit — mapping the legacy portal

Every screen and component was catalogued against the Horizon style guide to understand what existed, what mapped directly to IRIS, and what needed net-new design work.

FAC Administration — legacy Reseller view

FAC Administration — legacy Provision Users view

FAC Administration — legacy Provision Users alternate state

FAC Administration — legacy User Settings with modal

FAC Administration — legacy Third-Party Vendors table

FICO Analytic Cloud — legacy customer portal FAQ

FICO Analytic Cloud — legacy My Apps view

FICO Analytic Cloud — legacy Marketplace

Iteration 02

Design — applying IRIS to every surface

Each view was redesigned in Figma using the IRIS component library and handed off with annotated specs. The goal was a clean swap — legacy components out, IRIS in — with layout improvements where the opportunity was obvious.

FICO Analytic Cloud — Figma design file, full portal scope

FICO Analytic Cloud — Figma design frames, password and auth flows

FICO Analytic Cloud — redesigned email templates, activation and reset

Figma design scope — portal flows, auth screens, and transactional email templates all redesigned within the IRIS framework.

FICO Analytic Cloud — redesigned My Applications view

Iteration 03

Review — build QA with engineering

I conducted build reviews throughout — comparing implemented interfaces against designs, catching deviations early, and working with engineers directly to resolve them before moving to the next surface.

FAC build review — UI design tracking matrix: Figma, implementation, and validation status across all portal surfaces

FAC build review — form validation error message specification document

FAC build review — design feedback notes on disabled button states, clear button placement, and 2FA modal patterns

03 The Outcome

01

Complete IRIS Adoption

The FAC portal fully adopted the IRIS Design System — every component, every surface, every interaction pattern now aligned with the broader FICO platform.

02

Six-Month Delivery

A migration of this scope — from legacy audit through final build review — completed within six months without disrupting an enterprise product that customers depended on throughout the transition.

03

Unified Platform Experience

FAC users now move seamlessly between FICO products. One visual language, one interaction model, one design system — no more jarring context switches between old and new.

FAC portal — redesigned Term of Use page

FAC portal — redesigned Deprovision Users

FAC portal — redesigned Welcome homepage

FAC portal — redesigned Security & Compliance

FAC portal — homepage carousel: Test-Drive FICO Apps

FAC portal — homepage carousel: Take Online Courses

FAC portal — homepage carousel: Collaborate with Others

FICO Analytic Cloud completed a full design system migration in six months — a result that required persistent cross-functional collaboration, systematic governance, and a migration strategy that kept the product stable while it was being rebuilt underneath users who were still working in it every day.

The redesign wasn't just a visual refresh. It aligned FAC with FICO platform ecosystem, reduced the maintenance burden on engineering teams, and established a foundation that IRIS-native features could be built on without legacy constraints.

Following the 2023 redesign, FICO Analytic Cloud became a reference implementation for IRIS adoption across other legacy FICO products.

The migration established patterns and processes that other product teams could follow — a repeatable playbook for how to bring a mature enterprise product into a design system without breaking what already works.