DAT Freight & Analytics

Consolidating 15 legacy tools into one freight platform

DAT One replaced 15 disconnected freight tools with a single platform, giving customers one entry point to the largest freight marketplace in North America and more than a million daily load posts. I framed the direction with product and architecture leads, then carried it from an unresolved brief through launch as its sole designer after the rest of the design team left midway.

Timeline: 2019-2021
Role: Design Lead
Scope: Discovery, Research, Strategy, Execution, Design System

Problem

DAT’s freight workflow was split across separate products. Customers had to move between tools, re-enter information, and reconstruct the state of a shipment as they worked. The fragmentation also exposed gaps in DAT’s product portfolio: the company could support individual tasks, but not the full shipment lifecycle as one connected experience.

Research Findings

Customers could not easily tell which products and features were included in their subscription.
Product silos prevented data and workflow state from carrying across tools.
Low feature awareness meant customers often missed capabilities they already had.

A collage of DAT's separate legacy products, including the desktop load board, mapping tools, and mobile apps, each with its own interface and navigation. — Each product carried its own navigation and terminology, which meant customers were forced to rebuild the shipment at every step.

The freight fulfillment process laid out as a row of stages, with several stages crossed out to show where DAT had no product coverage. — Mapping the shipment lifecycle revealed the problem wasn't just fragmentation but gaps where DAT's portfolio was not represented.

Strategy & Role

As Design Lead, I framed DAT One around a single strategic idea: support customers at every meaningful point in the shipment journey. Rather than modernizing each legacy tool in isolation, I argued for starting at the shared core of the marketplace (posting and finding loads) and building a foundation the wider product ecosystem could grow into.

I partnered directly with product managers and technical architects to define the requirements, experience architecture, and sequence of delivery. The work did not arrive as a resolved brief. I turned competing customer, product, and platform constraints into a direction teams could execute and sequence. When the rest of the design team left halfway through the project, I continued as the sole designer without additional design resources, holding both the strategic throughline and hands-on delivery in an already ambiguous environment.

Feature consolidation

Research showed that not every legacy feature deserved to move forward. Brokers were increasingly relying on transportation management systems (TMSs) and expected data to move through APIs, an integration model DAT did not yet support. I used that evidence to argue for cutting rather than porting, so the MVP carried the workflows customers still performed inside DAT instead of a full inventory of legacy screens.

Improve core features

I prototyped and tested improvements to the highest-value workflows, then used the evidence to review priorities and tradeoffs with product owners. The goal was to make core tasks more continuous while creating clear reasons for customers to remain in the platform.

North star

A “Life of a Shipment” journey map was crafted along with cross-functional workshops to give teams a shared view of the end-to-end experience. The map connected customer pain points, business gaps, and team ownership, becoming a north star for sequencing work beyond the first release.

Carrier and broker shipment lifecycles mapped side by side as colour-coded stage grids. — Carrier and broker lifecycles mapped side by side: the two audiences share a marketplace but not a workflow.

The 'Life of a Shipment' journey map, showing shipment creation through to dashboard visibility, annotated with which stages the design lead and UX partner owned. — The journey map became the sequencing argument: which stages the first release had to cover, which could wait, and which team owned each one.

Execution

My first concepts were mobile-first for both brokers and carriers. Testing killed that assumption: brokers wanted a data-rich desktop workspace they could adapt to their own internal operational methods, not a phone-sized view of one. I changed direction and designed an accordion model that held a high-level view across many shipments while revealing detail on demand. It also created room for teams to work within dedicated environments, which made the pattern a better fit for the MVP and the broader platform.

Low-fidelity wireframe explorations of the shipment worklist, with rejected directions marked with a red cross and the chosen accordion layout marked with a green check. — The accordion model was selected because it was the only one that held overview, density, and detail in a single view.

The broker My Shipments worklist, a dense table of posted loads annotated with a callout showing the bid count on each shipment.

Broker shipment detail view with related trucks, bid booking controls and a route map.

The carrier My Shipments view with filters applied, overlaid with the private loads bid modal used to place a bid.

Bid and booking activity panels alongside tracking details and a route map, showing the accordion layout in use.

The assembled DAT One Dashboard Concept showing Weekly Posting Activity, Recent Negotiation Activity, National Truck Count, and Platform Release Notes.

Delivery

I adapted Material Design conventions into a DAT-specific theme and atomic component library, then organized the project structure so patterns could be reused across the platform rather than re-decided per team. I led an unmoderated usability study to evaluate the initial experience; our research team later supported a follow-up qualitative study to deepen the findings.

Design system documentation pages covering work groups, note-taking interactions, input field states and system notifications. — Documenting states and behaviour rather than only components, so the same interactions held across the platform instead of being re-decided per team.

Diagram of the Figma project library structure, mapping shared component libraries to the product libraries and external consumers that depend on them. — I ran weekly audits to ensure components were beiing utlilized and any concerns addressed. This ensured the structure and patterns were being reused.

Impact

DAT One brought 15 separate tools into a single platform, giving customers one entry point to North America’s largest freight marketplace and more than one million daily load posts. Beyond resolving immediate workflow and portfolio gaps, the platform created a foundation for later capabilities, including automated matching, real-time tracking, and stronger fraud prevention through future acquisitions.

Feature consolidation

The unified platform combined the load board, direct bidding, route mapping, real-time pricing analytics, and truck and parking amenities. Customers could move through these capabilities without navigating a portfolio of disconnected products.

Ecosystem Expansion

The shared experience and product architecture made it easier to integrate automated matching and real-time tracking capabilities added through later acquisitions.

Learning

The mobile-first framing was mine, and testing overturned it. What brokers needed was density: more of the portfolio visible at once, not the same view made portable. That moved the success criterion from working a shipment anywhere to seeing the state of every shipment without opening one, and it is the reason the worklist rather than the detail view became the centre of the product.