This piece lays out practical ways to improve UX in legacy systems by working within broken processes, focusing on changes that actually move the needle in organizations that can’t start from scratch.
Here’s the image for the article on improving UX in legacy systems.
One thing that helps a lot in legacy systems is doing “thin - slice” fixes around the highest - frequency tasks first, like clearer labels, better defaults, and fewer steps, because those changes survive even when the backend is messy.