I redesigned CBX (now TradeBeyond) to fix a major pain point in eCommerce - brands and retailers struggling to stay in sync throughout their supply chain. Our platform gives teams a clear view of what's happening at every step, from production to delivery. Instead of constantly putting out fires, businesses can now spot and fix issues before they impact customers' expectations for fast delivery.
As both product designer and business analyst, I bridged the gap between complex supply chain operations and user experience.
I dove deep into stakeholder needs, ran user research sessions, and turned insights into intuitive designs that actually worked for our users. Working hand-in-hand with our development team, I iterated on designs based on real user feedback, making sure we hit both business goals and user needs.
The real challenge with CBX wasn't just tackling supply chain complexity - it was making it feel simple for our users.
I spent time with logistics managers, warehouse teams, and retail buyers to understand their daily workflows. This led to designing interfaces with clear data visualizations that made sense of complex supply chain data. Through rounds of testing and refinement, we turned overwhelming processes into straightforward tasks that users could handle confidently.
I dove deep into understanding our users by spending time with supply chain directors like Samantha.
Beyond just interviews, I shadowed her for a day, watching her juggle supplier calls, switch between dashboards, and make quick decisions under pressure. These real-world observations shaped CBX's design - every feature had to pass the "Samantha test": Would this actually make her work easier? This hands-on approach helped us build something that truly worked for the people using it, not just something that looked good on paper.
Working with Samantha, one pain point kept coming up: the need for better visibility into supplier interactions. This sparked our core challenge:
how could we centralize all supplier communications and workflows in one intuitive place?
To crack this, I ran a card sorting workshop with our cross-functional teams, looking at it from the supplier's perspective. We uncovered some clear patterns: orders, invoices, and status updates naturally grouped together in what became our Order Management hub, while contracts, certificates, and RFx documents formed a separate Document center.
This hands-on approach with the team helped us build a navigation structure that matched how suppliers actually work, not just how we thought they should work. The result? A portal that finally made supplier management feel less like herding cats and more like an organized, efficient process.
I sketched and prototyped solutions based on our supplier feedback, constantly testing and refining to get it right. Our biggest challenge wasn't just building a portal - it was creating something that felt natural whether you were a small local manufacturer or a global distributor.
After launch, we saw the numbers we hoped for: supplier collaboration up by 20% and orders moving 15% faster through the system. But what really made it worth the effort? Hearing suppliers say they finally had a tool that worked with them, not against them..
Our product's interface was a mess - random colors, confusing typography, and duplicate features everywhere. This wasn't just hurting the user experience; it was making our engineers spend hours wrestling with inconsistent code.
So we stripped everything back to basics. Our new minimalist system gave designers creative freedom while keeping things simple enough for efficient development. By cutting the fluff, both teams could focus on what matters - building features users actually want, faster.
Finding information becomes so much easier. The transparency and accessibility of that information is huge for us.
