Results CRM helps businesses track all of their information about their customers in one place. It has numerous features for handling contacts, activities (emails, phone calls, meetings, etc.), projects, sales opportunities, financial records, and more. It also integrates with several other applications including QuickBooks, Outlook, and TSheets.

After my first semester of college, I started working at Results Software. I was tasked with making the UI for the application more modern as well as adding entirely new features. For this project I handled design and full-stack development. Three years later, this is what we have.

Results didn't have a dashboard when I joined the project. I created a simple but powerful dashboard that allows you to create graph and summary tiles. The editor for these tiles shows a live preview of what the tile will look like (with the actual data). There's also some fun but purposeful animations when editing these tiles.

Another entirely new module in Results that I created is the kanban boards. These boards make it easy to move items along through their workflow. The steps to each workflow are defined by the organization using the application, and users can filter the boards to just show the items that are relevant to them.

When I started working at Results, the DMCs (Data Management Centers) were practically the only way that users could view their data. Although we have the dashboards and kanban boards now, sometimes it's still helpful to just see things as a grid.

I rebuilt the DMCs from the ground up with numerous enhancements both in the UI and behind the scenes.

For instance, the old grids would load all of the data at once (not just what was visible). This became unbearably slow when users had thousands of records. In the new DMCs the records are paginated so they're much faster, and they stay fast, regardless of how many records the user has.

I also added in a preview panel where users can edit and save changes to records without leaving the DMC.

The old DMCs also offered an overwhelming number of fields for searching. (I kept these features, but hid them away so they don't scare off newer users.)

The primary means of searching in the new DMCs is through the Find field in the top right corner. This allows users to search several fields at once and highlights matches. (Even matches that just sound similar!)

This was quite a challenge, because I needed to keep the powerful (if convoluted) features of the old DMCs, while offering much simpler options.

The challenge of balancing power with simplicity is even more of an issue in the data entry screens. The original contact screen had 17 tabs, and looked like this:

I came up with a completely new design language for all of the data entry screens.

The new contact screen kept all of its old content, but now users could hide away the information they didn't need. They could rearrange the screen directly, and if they were having trouble finding something, they could search for it.

Another massive change was in adding items to financial records (quotes, invoices, etc.). In the old screen, users had to first create and save the "head" of the record. And then they could go through some dialogs to add products and services to that record.

This doesn't feel natural at all, so in the new screens I've made this much more modern.

All of the products and services can be added as soon as the user opens the screen for a new record. The values for the screen are re-calculated instantly as the user changes the information in the products and services. And of course, if users still need some more power, they can edit the details of any of these products / services in the panel.

My other projects are all built from scratch to begin with. Results CRM has presented a unique challenge, because it already had clients who depended on its existing features. But many of these features were tightly coupled to its archaic interface. I was able to keep these powerful features while still dramatically redesigning the product and adding new features.