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CargoEZ · Mobile CRm
Designing a CRM Mobile App for Freight Forwarders
Role
Sole Product Designer & Researcher
Tools
Figma
Duration
3 Months
platofrm
Mobile App
The Problem
The tool was never missing. The desk was just far away.
Freight forwarding agents relied on laptops for critical CRM tasks. New contacts from conferences were captured in notes or WhatsApp, while lead updates, quotations, vendor estimates, and approvals had to wait until they returned to their desks.
Before: Written down, buried by Tuesday.
After: Save Contact, generate Lead Instantly.
Research
Finding the actual pattern
I interviewed five freight forwarding agents, relationship managers, and operations staff using a predefined set of research questions. I documented their responses, synthesized recurring patterns, and used those insights to define the mobile CRM features.
Capture the Contact
Five fields. Save. Finish it later.
Everything downstream comes from one choice: capture must work with almost nothing on hand, and completion can wait. Five fields are mandatory to save a contact. Ports, full address, tags, and social links can be added later, from the same record.
Create Contact
Everything starts here. Users can scan every business contact in one place, search instantly, or narrow the list with advanced filters instead of scrolling through hundreds of records.
List of Contacts
Only the essential fields are required, so users can create a contact in seconds. The rest is organized into scrollable tabs, making it easy to complete later without leaving the page.
View Contact
Contact details stay at the top, followed by everything tied to that relationship leads, shipments, parties, documents, KYC, notes, and more. Sections appear only when they're relevant, reducing clutter.
The lead list
Not a directory. A triage queue.
So the question was never what fits on a card. It was what lets someone decide without tapping.
Sales rep, right on the front. No wondering whose deal this is
Ship date, also on the front. Urgency shouldn't be one tap away
Plane or ship icon leads the card, because you scan a shape faster than you read a word
Flags on the route, so SFO to LGP reads instantly
Status colours doing the work, so your eye catches "Won" before your brain reads it
Opening a lead
Three things visible before you scroll.
Filters
My first instinct was to cut them.
Ops said no.
Leads have twenty plus filterable fields. Trimming that list would have broken how the team actually works, and they made that very clear.
So instead of fewer filters, reusable ones. Build the combination once, save it, apply it in a tap forever after.
Advanced filters
Filter leads by any combination of criteria, created date, assigned rep, contact type, city, and more
Multiple values selectable per field, not locked to one choice at a time
Active filter count shown on each field so you always know what's applied
Save any filter combination with a name and reuse it in one tap
Clear everything and start fresh without losing your saved sets
key features
Built for the full journey
Every part of a lead, from routing to quotation, parties to documents, in one place. Nothing chased across screens.
Everything, on one screen.
Access the right section when you need it and keep work moving without unnecessary navigation.
Routing
One journey from pickup to delivery. Supports multiple pickups and lets users copy addresses instead of entering them again.
Quotation
One active quote with revisions. Approvals happen one person at a time, and every rejection includes a recorded reason.
Documents
Three visibility levels: private, public to everyone on the shipment, or shared with parties you pick.
Services
Optional extras like packing and insurance, each branching on a yes or no.
Design System Built on Atomic Design
To keep things scalable and consistent, I built the design system using the Atomic Design Methodology organizing everything into atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages.
This structured approach helped in more ways than one:
It ensured visual consistency across screens
Made components reusable and easier to maintain
Helped the developer implement faster with clearly defined UI patterns
Written for the two people building it.
Two developers, no design QA, and no time for a meeting every time something was ambiguous. So the file had to answer questions before they got asked.
4 point grid with spacing tokens, so spacing is something you look up, not something you eyeball
Auto layout and constraints everywhere, so resizing behaves instead of exploding
One component reused in every place it appears, so fixing it once fixes it everywhere
Figma organised by module, so nobody has to ask which page the quotation screens live on
Outcomes
Leads captured faster, and with less lost in transit.
The team didn't have direct access to end users during the engagement, but impact was visible through product behaviour and internal team feedback after rollout:
Agents could save a contact from the field the moment they met someone
Lead creation dropped from a delayed desktop workflow to a quick mobile action
Compliance and documentation tasks were handled inside the same app, on the go
The sales team had a single source of truth accessible anywhere, not just at their desks
After rollout, the app shipped on both Android and iOS. Within two weeks, 76% of the team had adopted it, and 80% said it covered their daily contact and lead workflow.
Contacts saved
on the spot
Agents no longer had to wait until they reached a laptop. A name, a route, a number captured the moment they met someone.
76% adopted it in two weeks
The team picked it up quickly. Most said it covered their day-to-day contact and lead workflow without needing a desktop at all.
No more leads lost to slow follow-up
Leads logged in the moment means less time before follow up. The window where a competitor could quote first got smaller.
Team : Kumaran Karunakaran & Kathiresan S (Mobile Dev), Kishore (QA) · Thanks to the stakeholders for continuous feedback.
