Lead UX Designer | 2021–2022
Redesigning CargoWise's opportunity management system from the ground up, shaped by interviews with sales teams across Europe and South America.
01
CargoWise's CRM module handles the full sales lifecycle for freight forwarders and logistics providers, from initial prospecting through to closed business.
The original interface was built on a legacy WinForms framework. It had been designed primarily around data capture, and the gap between what the system demanded and how sales teams actually operated had grown significant.
02
The original brief was a layout refresh. Research quickly made clear the problem went much deeper.
The existing CRM front-loaded an overwhelming number of fields. For a fresh lead that might not go anywhere, a salesperson had no reason to spend time filling everything out. Tools like Salesforce are built around speed and configurability, letting people capture the essentials and move on. The old WinForms interface gave the opposite impression, that the form had to be completed before progress was possible.
At the same time, the system was serving three fundamentally different users through one undifferentiated interface. Sales managers needed pipeline visibility and forecasting. Sales reps needed to move individual opportunities forward quickly. Operations staff needed to produce rate quotations accurately. None of these jobs were well served by the same screen.
03
The project began with structured customer interviews across ten companies in Europe and South America. Sessions were recorded and tagged in Dovetail, building up a picture of how different roles used the existing system and where it fell down.
Three clear personas emerged, salespeople, sales managers, and operations staff. An insight summary mapped their needs across the full sales lifecycle, from initial suspect identification through to repeat business. Each need was scored by how many participants shared it, which made it possible to prioritise by frequency rather than assumption.
The picture that came back was consistent. Each persona was doing a different job, with different pressures and a different definition of success. The existing CRM had been built as if there was only one.
04
The most important decision was the shift to progressive disclosure. Rather than presenting a comprehensive form upfront, the redesign let salespeople capture the minimum details needed to open an opportunity, then build the record out as the deal progressed. This matched how sales actually works. The effort invested in an opportunity should be proportional to how promising it looks.
A second key decision was unifying the create and maintain flows. The old system treated new opportunity creation as a separate modal, distinct from editing an existing record. Collapsing these into a single consistent screen removed unnecessary context switching and made clear that a half-filled record was a perfectly valid starting point.
The delivery was structured in phases. Rather than shipping the full redesign at once, the work was broken into stages that could be validated and released incrementally, with room to adjust based on what came back from real users.
05
The final design restructured the opportunity record around two primary tabs. The Details tab held the core data, including primary details, forecasting, lead source, custom fields, and stage tracking. The Sales activity tab provided a chronological view of tasks, communications, and touchpoints, making it easy to read the history of an opportunity at a glance.
A persistent stage tracker on the left gave salespeople and managers the pipeline context they needed without leaving the record. Forecasting sat alongside the form, visible but not dominant.
The dashboard was redesigned alongside the record, moving away from the dense legacy layout toward a lighter interface that surfaced the metrics each persona actually needed.
The design went through 21 iterations of lo-fi wireframes across multiple rounds of testing and feedback before reaching the final direction.
06
The project ran in close collaboration with the PM and a team of engineers. I brought the head of product directly into the research process, not just as a briefing audience but as a participant in interviews and workshops.
That involvement mattered. When the research came back clearly supporting a full redesign rather than a layout refresh, the head of product took those findings to the CEO to make the case. The full redesign was approved on the strength of the evidence.
Customer feedback continued through implementation, with follow-up conversations as parts of the system went live.
07
Parts of the redesign shipped during my time on the project and went through further rounds of customer feedback in production. When I transitioned to the design system team, the remaining work was handed over to a new designer to continue.
08
This project shifted how I think about enterprise software and the relationship between effort and workflow.
The instinct in enterprise software is often to capture as much data as possible, chasing more fields, more completeness, more visibility for the business. The research pushed back on that.
Salespeople weren't avoiding the system because they were resistant to it. They were protecting their time for the work that actually moved deals forward. The form was asking for a level of commitment that the early stages of a deal hadn't earned yet.
Progressive disclosure was the design response to that insight, but the bigger lesson was about recognising who actually bears the cost of a design decision. The overhead of a long form is invisible to a product manager. It's very visible to a salesperson who does it twenty times a day.