( Teamfront / January 2024 – Present )

Arborgold Platform Redesign

The redesign turned a legacy field service platform into a modern, cohesive product across web and mobile, unified on the Align UI Design System.

My role: Lead UI/UX Designer
Timeline: January 2024 – Present
Category: Enterprise SaaS Product Design
Status: Redesign, delivered

Tools Figma, Figma Prototyping, Align UI Design System

Generated schematic standing in for imagery of Arborgold Platform Redesign. It depicts nothing. — Generated schematic, not a screenshot of Arborgold Platform Redesign.

Generated schematic, not a screenshot. Real imagery to follow.

( The account )

Context

Arborgold is an all-in-one field service management platform built for the green industry: tree care and arborist companies, landscapers, lawn care and turf plant health care providers, and snow removal operations. It runs the full operating cycle of a service business, from lead capture and customer records through job estimation, proposal generation, and scheduling, to invoicing, payment collection, and post-service communication. It supports multi-branch operations, crew tracking, accounts receivable, consumer financing through a Wisetack integration, two-way SMS, marketing campaigns, e-signatures, and an AI-powered customer operations agent, with role-based access control and two-factor authentication behind it.

This project was a redesign of that platform across its two working surfaces. The web application, the back-office system where administrators and office staff do their work, covered 20 or more modules. Arborgold Crew, the mobile app for field crews on iOS and Android, covered more than 145 screens across 19 modules. They are the same product seen from two vantage points: the desk and the truck. The multi-branch Corporate Portal, a separate product in the same family, has its own case study.

The platform was functionally deep, but the interface had accumulated years of UX debt from iterative feature additions. Both surfaces had grown module by module without a shared design system, so patterns diverged, navigation fragmented, and the surface area outgrew the structure holding it together. The gap showed most on mobile, where the app lagged behind what crews were used to on their own phones.

The problem

Two surfaces, one underlying condition: deep functionality wrapped in an interface that had stopped keeping pace with it. The problems clustered in the same places on both.

No shared design system. Every module on web and mobile had evolved independently. Typography, spacing, color usage, and component patterns varied section to section, producing jarring transitions and raising cognitive load for people who switch tasks constantly through the day. New features were designed in isolation, which compounded design debt and slowed development.
Information architecture that did not match how people work. On web, sending a proposal, taking a payment, or managing a crew schedule meant excessive clicks and context-switching across disconnected modules. On mobile, job details, work order status, service schedules, and customer information were buried under unclear layers, which is costly for crews working in time-sensitive outdoor conditions who need information at a glance.
Onboarding with no structured path. New web users met a complex, unguided interface, and businesses in different verticals, tree care versus landscaping versus snow removal, had no tailored setup route. Time-to-value was long and the support burden was high.
Communication scattered across tools. Web messaging and SMS lacked a modern conversation interface, with customer history split across email logs, notes, and separate screens. Crews had no integrated way to send or receive SMS or email in job context, so they switched tools and missed messages.
Field workflows the product did not cover. Plant inventory, site measurement, chemical application logging, weather monitoring, and delivery management were absent, rudimentary, or disconnected from the job they belonged to, so crews fell back on paper and outside tools. In-field invoicing and payment collection were limited, which pushed work back to the office and slowed the billing cycle.
Customer-facing documents that undercut trust. E-Proposals, E-Invoices, and E-Statements are the touchpoints customers actually see, and their inconsistent, dated design did not inspire confidence or make paying easy, which bears directly on cash flow.
No single view of a customer. Customer data, communication history, job records, and billing sat in separate modules, so service teams had no complete picture during a call.
Friction on the feature crews touch most. Clock in and out took too many steps and left employee clock state, multi-job transitions, and service-level time allocation unclear. Crew leaders managing several employees across overlapping jobs had no streamlined way to handle any of it.
Authentication behind enterprise standards. The login flow had no multi-factor protection, an unnecessary risk for businesses holding sensitive financial and customer data.

What I did

The approach was a systematic, module-by-module redesign of both products on a single foundation: the Align UI Design System, adopted and extended for Arborgold's domain. That choice made the rest tractable. With one component vocabulary, one set of tokens, and one interaction grammar shared across web and mobile, consistency stopped being something each module had to earn on its own, and new features inherit it by default instead of adding to the debt.

On that foundation, each surface was restructured around the work its users actually do. The web platform was organized around the operating cycle of a service business, with a configurable dashboard on top for daily business health, a jobs module carrying the full lifecycle from generated through proposal to work order and completion, a unified customer profile that pulls information, jobs, messages, tasks, files, AR, and activity into one tabbed record, a conversation-style two-way SMS hub, redesigned customer-facing E-Proposal, E-Invoice, and E-Statement documents built responsive for desktop and mobile, and a guided site setup flow that branches by industry vertical.

Arborgold Crew was rebuilt around the shape of a crew's day: a home dashboard with route summaries and resource overviews, a jobs section with tabbed navigation across work order, job details, site, files, and deliveries, and contextual drill-downs from there. Time tracking, the most-used feature in the app, was streamlined into one-tap clock actions with crew-level management. New field modules brought plant inventory, site measurements, weather, and deliveries into job context, and in-field invoicing and payment collection let crews close the billing loop on site. The interface supports English and Spanish, reflecting the bilingual reality of many green industry crews.

Outcomes

Unified a fragmented interface across two products, more than 20 web modules and 145 or more Crew mobile screens across 19 modules, into one visual language that reduces cognitive load when moving between sections.
Eliminated the design debt that came from designing every feature in isolation, and established a scalable, maintainable foundation that accelerates future feature development and reduces design-to-development handoff friction.
Shortened time-to-value for new web users with a guided setup flow tailored to six industry verticals, reducing the support burden that an unguided interface created.
Replaced scattered messaging with modern conversation-style communication on web and an integrated SMS and email hub in the field app, cutting context-switching between tools and the missed follow-ups it caused.
Delivered professional, responsive customer-facing E-Proposal, E-Invoice, and E-Statement experiences that build customer trust and make payment easier, supporting faster collection for service businesses.
Enabled crews to manage an entire workday in one app, from clock-in through field operations to invoicing and payment collection, supporting faster billing cycles, better crew accountability through structured time tracking, and on-site service transparency for customers.
Consolidated a previously siloed customer record into a single tabbed profile with financial summary, giving service teams a complete picture during a call.
Strengthened the platform's security posture with two-factor authentication across web and mobile, covering SMS, email, and authenticator app methods with OTP verification.
Opened new revenue surfaces through the AI Agent and Customer Command Center feature pages, and positioned Arborgold to compete with modern SaaS products while keeping the deep domain functionality its existing customers depend on.

What I learned

Across two products that share a business but not a context, the design system was the highest-leverage decision by a wide margin. An office desktop and a phone in a truck carry genuinely different constraints, and the instinct is to solve each on its own terms. Building both on one extended foundation kept the shared parts shared and the differences deliberate, which is what let the surface area grow without coherence falling apart.

Restructuring architecture is where the real work lives, and it is easy to underrate next to visual redesign. A new component library makes a product look current. It does nothing for the office staff burning clicks on a proposal, or the crew digging three layers down for job details in the field. The modules that improved most were the ones where the hierarchy was rebuilt around the actual sequence of someone's work instead of inherited from the legacy menu.

Designing for field crews reset my assumptions about information density. The reflex from back-office work is to spread information out and let people navigate to it. Outdoors, mid-job, on a phone, that is exactly backwards: crews needed job count, hours, revenue, and service status readable at a glance, and one-tap actions on the feature they touch most. Getting the mobile app right meant designing for interruption and haste rather than for focus.

Context

The problem

What I did

Outcomes

What I learned

( Tags )