Senior Product Designer, joining as the second employee and building the design practice from scratch. I led UX research, design, and testing for the customer portal, while also mentoring junior designers and interns.
Worked directly with the founder, sales, and engineering to deliver a scalable, customer-facing platform.
Design and launch a portal that allowed customers to log in, track orders, download invoices, and reduce dependency on sales reps.
3 month design delivery
Legacy manufactures custom acoustical sealing systems. As the business scaled, customer service was overwhelmed with daily calls for order updates, shipping details, and invoices — all of which existed in internal systems but were not customer-facing. This bottleneck slowed growth and frustrated customers.
How might we give customers direct access to the information they need — orders, tracking, invoices — while reducing the load on sales and improving transparency?
Requirements Gathering
Defined must-haves: order history, shipment tracking, invoice downloads, and customer account access.
Establishing alignment across sales & founder
Conducted interviews with sales staff, analyzed common customer questions, and benchmarked competitors (who lagged in portal usability).
Personas & Customer Interviews
Met with customers to identify existing pain points for preliminary research.
Sketching, Prototyping & User Testing
Validated mobile-first and desktop prototypes directly with customers and sales team; Explored multiple design options; testing revealed customers confused PO numbers with order numbers — resolved by surfacing order status chips.
Customers valued at-a-glance status (e.g., “Shipped” chip) over dense data tables.
Industry competitors offered overly complex or nonexistent portals; a clean, modern design differentiated Legacy.
PO numbers and order numbers needed clear separation; tested language resolved confusion.
Portal design needed to expand as Legacy scaled, setting foundation for 7+ websites and 1 internal portal.
Customer Portal: Mobile-first and desktop portal for order history, tracking, invoices, and downloads.
Status Visibility: At-a-glance order chips showing key details (order number, PO, ship date, status).
Scalable Design Standards: Created design principles and reusable patterns that expanded across multiple sites.
Cultural Contribution: Built design culture, mentored 12+ interns, and shaped design’s role as Legacy grew to 50+ employees.
A simple portal eliminated a major sales bottleneck and directly drove revenue.
By grounding design in customer and sales feedback, we solved the right problems.
Design standards built here scaled across 7 sites and future-proofed the business.
As the second employee, I established design as a core function and mentored the next generation of designers.
