A strong User Experience team of six specialists was assembled and immediately started doing stuff that a UX team does. We started visiting our partners, doing interviews, observations and usability testing. We defined user personas; fictional users with characteristics derived from our research that help everybody imagine the real person requiring and using the functionalities. And we started supporting development – creating and testing wireframes and prototypes of new features.
The big change came in summer 2013, when it was decided that version 8 would be pushed to March and there would be three months of development time devoted entirely to the UI redesign.