Building Ascend from a whiteboard to a signed contract.
I was the only designer at Ascend for 8 months. I ran the research, designed 5 products on one shared system, and our first client signed before the platform was done.
Founding Designer at Ascend Cargo Systems. I was the first design hire and owned research, product design, and the design system.
People were juggling as many as 8 or 9 tools to move billions in cargo.
I started by talking to people who'd spent decades in the industry, like advisors, planners, and dispatchers. They'd built whole careers moving cargo, and a lot of that time went into working around their tools.
Industry surveys showed the same thing they were telling me.
Source: McKinsey, “Digital logistics: Technology race gathers momentum,” 2023.
The job itself is easy to describe. Move the shipment, stop anything that would block it, and get the cargo where it needs to go. But people were doing that across 8 or 9 tools that didn't talk to each other, so they filled the gaps themselves.
Then I tried the tools myself. The layouts looked alike from one platform to the next, but the interactions changed on every one. I got lost as a first-timer, even though the work itself made sense to me.
What people were working with
- 1Lots of icons, and many of them don't work on every page.
- 2The tables look simple, but the colors carry meaning that doesn't come across.
- 3Tabs with no real limit, and they change depending on which menu item you're on.
- 1Permanent tabs, but they don't do much.
- 2The analysis is vague and hard to read at first look.
- 1A huge learning curve, like most of these tools.
- 2The yard visualizer isn't much help in this outdated setup.
- 3The yard orders don't connect to anything else on the screen.
Each tool looked a lot like the others, but the same task worked differently on every one.
What I found, and what I designed because of it
The research kept coming back to one thing. People didn't need more information. They needed the right information when they were making a call, with enough context to act on it. So that became my filter. If a feature didn't make those calls easier, it didn't go on the screen.
How the tabs work, and why they stop at 15
A dispatcher could be working an active shipment, an open order, and a billing dispute at the same time. They can't lose that because a tab closed. So early on I decided on permanent tabs, closable tabs, and a 15-tab limit, so people never lose their place.
The engineers pushed back on permanent tabs and the 15-tab limit. They were worried about clutter and unpredictable states, and that was fair. But closing every tab in a logistics workflow causes problems too. So I showed them what losing context actually costs a dispatcher. I also pointed to tools people already trust, where the tab limit is what keeps them usable.
“You can lose context really fast with a lot of tabs. And that costs people time.”
Each module got its own permanent tabs, sized to its workflow. Closable tabs cap at 15. That's enough for heavy multitasking and still easy to read. The cap is what kept the experience working when things got busy.
One set of pieces, every module
Weeks of onboarding was one of the biggest costs people had. So every module was built from the same components. Once you learned one, the others came faster. I built the library so anyone can click through it.
Shipment management, start to finish
The founder wanted clients to be able to buy one module at a time. That meant every module had to work as a full product on its own, with its own navigation and workflow, and still feel like part of the same system. A client who bought shipment management but not billing still got a full, working experience. Here's how orders and shipments went from the first sketch to the finished screens.
Our first client signed before the platform shipped.
The client is a top-10 pet food company valued at $1.5B. They move $100M to $200M in product a year.
They signed before the platform was done. They could see where it was going, and the foundation was solid enough for them to trust it.
“When I left, Ascend had a product, a way of working, and a signed client. None of that was there when I started.”
I stand by the design. Where things slipped was communication between products. Each PM owned a different one, and I was usually the only person who knew how all five connected.
Once I saw that, I met with all the PMs to build a product map together. Then I set up regular meetings where I, the PMs, or the developers could bring up anything that needed to stay consistent across products. Next time I'd do that from day one.
A platform for mothers and military families, shaped by 500+ survey responses and 8 interviews.
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