SUBARU OF NEW ENGLAND · 2022 - 2023
One Platform
for 60+ Retailers
Consolidating eight fragmented legacy tools into a single, modern dealer management system — and redefining how Subaru of New England's retailers run their day.
MY ROLE
Lead UX Designer,
Property
STATUS
Shipped in 2023
PLATFORM
Desktop Web
THE PROBLEM
Eight platforms.
Zero coherence.
SNE retailers were navigating over eight separate platforms every single day — each with different interfaces, different login credentials, and different levels of neglect. The central system hadn't been meaningfully updated in 25 years.
The real cost wasn't just frustration. It was time. Retailers were burning hours figuring out which tool to use before they could even start a task. And with no search, no favorites, and hover menus that disappeared on a single pixel's movement, the system was working against the people who depended on it most.
8+
Disparate Platforms
Retailers needed to switch between eight separate tools for daily operations
25
Years without an Update
The core system hadn't been meaningfully redesigned since the late 1990s.
60+
Retailers Impacted
Every dealership across New England depended on this broken infrastructure
OVERVIEW
The first designer in the building.
This was a greenfield role. No design team to inherit, no system to iterate on — just eight fragmented legacy platforms, a network of retailers frustrated by decades of accumulated technical debt, and an opportunity to build something new from scratch.
SNE Drive was the answer: a single, modern platform purpose-built for how Subaru of New England's retailers actually work — across roles, across devices, and across every function from selling cars to ordering parts to pulling reports.
WHO USES IT
One system. Four distinct roles.
Every role had distinct tasks and access needs. The design had to serve all of them without becoming a swiss-army-knife nightmare.
Welcome Desk
First point of contact
Sales
Vehicles & financing
Service
Parts & repairs
Management
Reporting + oversight
ROLE
Hybrid UX — research through handoff.
I owned the full design lifecycle: auditing the legacy system and mapping where it broke down, conducting observations and interviews with retailer employees, wireframing and prototyping the new platform, running usability testing, and building the UI through to development handoff.
SCOPE & CONSTRAINTS
Unify all eight platforms. Ship in one year.
The goal was a single hub covering every function currently split across eight tools — responsive across desktop and mobile. The binding constraint was time: a one-year delivery window meant we couldn't rebuild everything from scratch. We had to be strategic about what to rebuild, what to salvage from legacy code, and what to cut entirely.
The retailers knew exactly what was broken. My job was to listen carefully enough to understand what they actually needed — and design something that finally respected their time.
SNE DRIVE DESIGN APPROACH
THE STARTING POINT
Twenty-five years of accumulated friction.
Before designing anything, I spent time deeply understanding Subaru Solutions and the seven platforms alongside it. What I found was a textbook case of what happens when software goes untouched for decades.
Subaru Solutions Legacy State
Three separate hover-activated menus — one pixel off-target and the entire menu disappeared, forcing users to start over
No responsiveness — built without media queries, unusable on any screen outside the original desktop resolution
Homepage dominated by car imagery — this aged immediately with every new model year, burying the tools users actually needed
Reports displayed as dense, visually exhausting rows — no hierarchy, no scannability, no modern formatting
No search, no favorites — finding anything required already knowing where it lived
SNE Drive - Redesigned
Cleaner data signals. Vehicle info, VIN, location — all retrievable and structured.
Single persistent left-rail nav with a role-aware mega menu — tailored to each user's job title and access level
Fully responsive across desktop and mobile — designed for the floor, not just the back office
Dashboard transformed into a real-time hub — key metrics, announcements, and alerts from SNE HQ front and center
Reports rebuilt with clean typographic hierarchy — scannable, consistent, and contemporary
Search & sort options — Global search at the top of every view, plus a favorites system to surface most-used pages instantly
PROCESS
Research first.
Then redesign.
I ran observations and interviews across departments before drawing a single screen — talking to welcome desk, sales, service, and management to map what they actually used, what they ignored, and what they'd been waiting years for someone to fix.
O1
Legacy Audit
Deep walkthrough of all eight platforms — documenting navigation structures, friction points, and what was stale versus essential.
O2
User Research
Observations and interviews with retailer employees across every role — mapping their critical paths, frustrations, and unmet needs.
O3
IA + Wireframes
Reorganized the full information architecture across departments, then built wireframes and ran usability tests to validate navigation patterns.
O4
UI + Handoff
High-fidelity designs and a prototype ready for development — responsive, role-aware, and built to scale across all 60+ retailers.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Four choices that define the property experience.
01
Replace three broken menus with one role-aware mega menu.
The legacy system's hover-activated menus were a daily frustration — one pixel off-target and everything vanished. The redesign replaced all three with a single persistent left-rail nav. Clicking any item opens a mega menu whose contents adapt to the user's job title and access permissions. Usability testing confirmed this was dramatically more efficient for navigating across pages.
Users can also star any menu item to pin it as a favorite — surfacing their most-used pages at the top of every view, exactly like browser bookmarking. A global search bar rounds it out, giving users a direct path to anything without having to remember where it lived in the hierarchy.
02
Turn the dead homepage into a live operations dashboard.
The legacy landing page was dominated by car photography that became outdated the moment a new model year dropped — and communicated nothing actionable. The redesign replaced it with a real-time dashboard: key metrics at a glance, a central widget for announcements and alerts from SNE headquarters, and direct access to the pages each role uses most.
Removing all imagery was a deliberate longevity decision — a data-forward layout that wouldn't require a redesign every September when new vehicles launched.
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03
Reports that don't hurt to look at.
The legacy reporting interface was visually exhausting — dense rows of alternating-color data with no hierarchy, no breathing room, and no clear way to scan for what you needed. Users were spending more time decoding the format than acting on the information.
The redesign standardized every report with a clean typographic hierarchy: consistent column structure, proper spacing, and a layout that lets the data speak instead of fighting for attention. The result was reports that felt modern, were faster to read, and didn't require a tutorial to navigate.
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THE RESULT
Eight platforms.
Now one.
SNE Drive launched as the primary operational hub for retailers across Subaru of New England's entire network. With the platform ready for production, dependency on the other eight tools diminished — and retailers had, for the first time, a single place to run their entire operation.
The inaugural design role became a proof of concept: that investing in experience design at SNE wasn't a nice-to-have. It was the difference between a system people tolerated and one they could actually use.
→ SNE Drive became the single operational hub for 60+ retailers, replacing eight fragmented legacy platforms
→ Role-aware mega menu validated as significantly more efficient than legacy hover navigation in usability testing
→ Delivered within a one-year timeline by strategically salvaging compatible legacy code rather than rebuilding from scratch
→ Established UX as a core function at SNE — the first dedicated designer role in the organization's history