ERP & CRM Platform for Manufacturing

The platform is an enterprise ERP & CRM system built to compete with Salesforce and NetSuite. Its feature set was strong, but the interface had not kept up: every new module was squeezed into a horizontal tab bar, setup flows behaved differently from screen to screen, and users lost track of where they were.

For a product selling on breadth, the navigation had become the bottleneck — the more the platform grew, the harder it became to use.

As lead designer I owned the work end to end — from diagnosing the problems to shaping the solution and planning how to prove it.

A heuristic evaluation of the core CRM flows surfaced 15 issues across usability, navigation, interface and process. Rather than fixing them one by one, I grouped them into the few structural problems holding the product back — and let those set the redesign priorities.

Horizontal tabs capped how many modules could be visible at once, so every new feature pushed something else into a dropdown. I moved navigation into a collapsible vertical sidebar: it scales to any number of modules, keeps the current app always visible, and matches how people naturally scan a screen — top to bottom, left side first.

Each round tested a different answer to the same question: how do people get back to the work they care about fastest? The later rounds added context directly into the menu — recent records, saved views and deal summaries appear on hover, so users can jump straight to what they need without opening a module first.

A final round explored menu background tints (neutral and purple scales) to balance contrast against dense tables — decided directly in the design system tokens.

Setting up a company, building a quote and creating a new object used to behave in three different ways. I designed one wizard pattern — a progress stepper, a clear header for the current step and consistent Back / Continue actions with autosave — and applied it across 5+ journeys. In object creation, AI suggests the fields a team is likely to need, so setup starts from a sensible default instead of a blank form.

To make sure the new flows matched how deals are actually won, I mapped the full opportunity lifecycle — from prospecting to won or lost — across user actions, frontstage and backstage processes, pain points and opportunities. A proto-persona and a detailed scenario kept the team focused on the sales rep doing the work.

To keep the redesign consistent as the product grows, I built the design system from scratch: a structured colour palette (Neutrals, Purple, Green, Blue, Teal, Red, Orange, Brown) mapped to semantic tokens, a clear Inter type scale from Headline Large 30px to Label XSmall 11px, and a component library covering tables, charts, page templates, illustrations and icons.

A redesign is a hypothesis until real users confirm it. The engagement ended before sessions could run, so I handed the team a complete, ready-to-run usability test plan — so the next step would be measuring the new navigation, not debating it.