Customer Master

Empowering sales associates with faster data access and seamless customer onboarding.

About the project

Winsupply needed to modernize Mailing Master, part of their established WISE ERP system. While the legacy tool had served Local Company employees well over the years, it created serious usability issues. Users had to memorize complex workflows and constantly switch between multiple screens just to fill out basic customer information fields.

I was brought in to design Customer Master, a web application that would replace this tool and kick off Winsupply's broader modernization efforts. The goal was creating something streamlined for daily customer data management without losing the proven business logic that people depended on.

ROLE

Product Designer

Platform

Web

TIMELINE

Jun 2022 – Jan 2023

LOCATION

Dayton

My first step was understanding what made the old system valuable before changing anything. I interviewed Local Companies and Winsupply Support team members to map out common user flows and figure out which information naturally belonged together.

Then I visited Local Companies to watch sales associates work with the current system. These observations revealed the exact pain points—where the memorization requirements and screen-jumping were killing productivity. This field research became the foundation for everything that followed.

I ran over 15 virtual testing sessions with users nationwide to validate my findings and test new approaches. The challenge was eliminating cognitive load while preserving all the functionality that made users effective.

I redesigned the entire information architecture around actual workflows instead of technical constraints. Fields were grouped logically, and I eliminated the need to remember where different pieces of customer data lived across multiple screens. The search functionality got completely rebuilt, and I streamlined the customer creation process to follow the natural sequence users actually needed.

Sales associates could finally complete their daily tasks without fighting the interface. The familiar functionality remained, but organized in a way that actually supported how people work. I created tutorial content and presented Customer Master at Winsupply's National Training conference, where user feedback during my demo led to valuable additions like the Contacts Tab.

Customer Master became the template for Winsupply's ongoing modernization—proving that legacy systems could be transformed while respecting the business logic that made them valuable in the first place. The project showed how thoughtful research and design could bridge the gap between outdated interfaces and modern user expectations.