No anchor to react to. Most redesigns have a predecessor to critique — you can point at what's confusing and propose something better. Here, there wasn't a clean interface to react to, but there wasn't nothing either: a platform did exist, it just didn't support much beyond the bare minimum. Registering as a merchant meant filling out long forms; submitting evidence meant uploading files and then waiting — a slow, people-heavy process stitched on top of software that couldn't carry it on its own. The UI itself hadn't been touched in years: dense forms and stacked cards with no real hierarchy. Every flow and edge case still had to be invented from scratch, then tested against whether it held up without a human on the other end to explain things. The real task was building a chargeback platform from nothing, covering everything the managed service used to handle while opening new ground it never touched.

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