002 AuTOMOTIVE
Rebuilding a CRM for 3,000+ global sales users spread across 5 disconnected apps.
UX DESIGN LEAD | UX STRATEGY
FIGMA, MURAL
CAR INDUSTRY
01/ Overview
TIMELINE
The project focused on rebuilding an existing CRM as part of a migration to Dynamics 365 and Power Apps.
The existing solution had grown into a complex ecosystem of tools and workflows. I joined the project to help define a clearer product experience while balancing business requirements, user needs and technical constraints.
TEAM & LANGUAGE
The team was composed of 6 offshore developers, 3 business analysts, 3 testers, and 1 PO, located in Germany, India and Slovakia.
I was the UX Design lead and part of the BA team.
The languages used in the team were German and English.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
The existing CRM had become fragmented across five different applications. The goal was to bring these workflows together into a single source of truth for vehicle sales, while making the new CRM easier to understand and more efficient to use. The challenge was not simply to consolidate five applications into one.
It was to decide what information users actually needed, when they needed it, and how much complexity could realistically be removed.
02/ PROBLEM & CONTEXT
USERS
The CRM was used by 3,000+ sales and business users worldwide, across Europe, Africa and the US.
The main user groups included:
Salespeople
Dealership managers
HQ back-office teams
The product supported the sales process for both new and used vehicles, from lead management to opportunities and vehicle information.
BUSINESS IMPACT
The CRM was directly connected to the sales process.
The business wanted to create a single source of truth, improve operational efficiency and support collaboration across markets.
However, consolidating five applications also meant bringing together different processes, information structures and user expectations.
The product therefore had to support both global consistency and the realities of local workflows.
03/ RESEARCH & INSIGHTS
KEY RESEARCH METHODS
Contextual inquiry & field studies
I conducted contextual research during the pilot phase to understand how users worked with vehicle and customer information in their real environment.
Observing the workflow in context helped identify where the new CRM was adding complexity rather than removing it.
Workshops & Card Sorting
Workshops with stakeholders and users helped identify priorities, dependencies and different mental models around the information architecture.
Card sorting was used to test how information could be structured in a way that matched users' expectations rather than simply reproducing the architecture of the previous applications.
CRITICAL FINDINGS
Five applications had become one mental model
Users were effectively working across five different applications.
The challenge was not only technical consolidation: users had developed habits and workarounds around each individual tool.
Simply reproducing all of this information in one interface would create a new problem — an application that technically contained everything but was difficult to navigate.
The 360° vehicle view
The first concept brought a large amount of vehicle information into a single 360° view.
Although this seemed efficient from a business perspective, testing showed that users struggled to identify what was actually relevant to their task.
The result was a high abandonment rate.
Onboarding was a significant part of the experience
The complexity of the product meant that users could take approximately three months to feel confident using the system.
This made information architecture and progressive disclosure particularly important.
The goal was not just to make individual screens usable, but to create a product that users could gradually understand and master.
04/ DESIGN PROCESS
FROM RESEARCH TO SOLUTION
The research highlighted a recurring pattern:
The more information we put in front of users, the harder it became for them to understand what mattered.
The design process therefore focused on separating information according to user needs and creating clearer pathways through the CRM.
KEY ITERATIONS
Iteration 1 : Rethinking the vehicle overview
Initial design: The first concept explored a comprehensive 360° vehicle view, bringing all mandatory information and related content into a single screen. From a business perspective, this offered a complete overview.
Testing revealed: Users struggled to identify the information relevant to their immediate task within the dense overview. In usability testing, 55% of task attempts were unsuccessful.
Pivot: Instead of forcing everything into one view, I redesigned the experience around a clearer sitemap and subpages, while retaining the information required by the business.
This created a more progressive way of accessing information without removing critical content.
Result: The rate of unsuccessful task attempts decreased from 55% to 16%.
Iteration 2 : Building an embedded application.
Initial design: Managing vehicle images required users to work through individual actions, creating a repetitive and time-consuming workflow.
Testing revealed: The interaction was particularly inefficient when users needed to perform the same action across multiple images.
This created unnecessary friction in a task that could be handled much more efficiently through bulk actions.
Pivot: I redesigned the selection and bulk-action pattern to allow users to manage multiple images at once.
The interaction was simplified around the actual task rather than the underlying system structure.
Result: The redesigned workflow reduced task completion time by 32%.
DESIGN DECISIONS & RATIONALE
Task relevance over information completeness
Research to challenge stakeholder assumptions
05/ SOLUTION
FINAL DESIGNS
PROBLEM SOLVED
From fragmented tools to a clear product
The new CRM brought workflows previously distributed across five applications into a more coherent experience. Rather than reproducing the complexity of the old ecosystem, the redesigned structure helped users access information progressively and focus on the task at hand.
Information overload
The final designs retained the information required by the business while reducing the amount users had to process at once. This made complex workflows easier to navigate without compromising the product's underlying requirements.
06/ IMPACT & RESULTS
METRICS & OUTCOMES
< 16%
Unsuccessful Task Attempts.
+80%
Users no longer switching applications
-32%
Task completion time
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED
Balancing business requirements and user needs
This project reinforced how easily a product can become more complicated when every stakeholder requirement is treated as equally important. The role of UX was not to remove business requirements, but to understand their purpose and find a way to support them without transferring unnecessary complexity to users.
Designing across distributed teams
Working with developers, Business Analysts and testers across Germany, India and Slovakia required clear communication and continuous alignment. It reinforced the importance of making design decisions understandable beyond the design team — particularly when working across different cultures, disciplines and technical contexts.
These projects are presented in an anonymised format due to client confidentiality. The visuals are illustrative, while the challenges, approach and outcomes reflect the actual work.