Carvana Dash
Saving seven figures in OpEx with custom software
Carvana (with codeLab303) | UX, Strategy, + Design Leadership | Spring 2023 – Early 2024
How do you unify communication, documentation, and brand culture for a 20,000+ person company with a tool no one dreads using AND everyone trusts?
Long story short
hours gained using The Dash (5m/wk per user)
86 SUS
along with 91.6 TSR in user testing
$1M+
saved in eliminated or curtailed licenses
❓The Problem
Carvana’s internal knowledge tools were fragmented, costly, and ineffective. Confluence wasn’t trusted, especially by field employees, and Google Sites lacked any consistent structure, branding, or usability. As a result:
Employees didn’t know where to find information
When they did, they didn’t trust it
Internal conversations devolved into Slack pings or email threads
Costs for enterprise licenses ran into the high seven figures
Carvana needed a replacement: a single, authoritative, intuitive source of truth.
🧑💼 My Role
I've had the good fortune and fun challenge of being the sole designer, strategist, and experience designer on a number of projects over the years. For The Dash, it was the same on a whole new scale...I was the sole practitioner creating a new CMS, Intranet, search experience, and segment of the Carvana brand. From discovery and workshops, to hands on in Figma, to running and scoring user testing, the 1.0 launch of Carvana was the deepest and most extensive solo undertaking I've had. Thank goodness for the incredibly capable and talented engineering team at codelab303. As design and UX lead for the project, I was responsible for:
Driving early discovery: user research, content audits, template analysis
Defining a strategic North Star: universal search and authoritative comms
Leading design sprints, usability testing, and field validation
Designing and specifying the componentized CMS, including moderation workflows and mobile-accessible authoring tools
Aligning stakeholders across engineering, HR, and comms
Partnering with Carvana’s internal design director to scale the visual system across templates
While I no longer work on the evolution of The Dash, any mention I see or update I hear brings me a lot of professional joy. It's a first rate product for a truly first rate company and I had a hoot making it.
🔍 Approach + Process
I have, like most experience and design practitioners, a toolbox of things I like to use and a loose process for leveraging them. However, reality is the enemy of perfect process and adaptability the servant of great products...so I was flexible.
Research & Discovery
Conducted user interviews across engineering, field ops, HR, and corporate teams
Measured perceived tech aptitude to inform accessibility and usability design
Used the System Usability Scale (SUS) to benchmark performance—early scores hit 86+
Facilitated in-person workshops (Tempe, AZ) including card sorting and tree testing
Audited 20+ Google Site templates, identifying common modules and user journeys
Strategy & North Star
Search emerged as the key unifier—employees needed:
A universal search bar, like Spotlight or Command-K
A way to search across Confluence, Google Drive, Tableau, and the new intranet
Clear signals of accuracy, relevance, and freshness in search results
We defined a design and information architecture strategy that emphasized:
A Launchpad UI: high-importance messages + federated search
Progressive content tailoring from homepage > dashboard > team pages
A unified, accessible CMS to author, moderate, and publish content across devices
🛠️ The Solution
The mandate for the 1.0 launch of The Dash was pretty simple...just replace all of our frustration with using Confluence's broken search, a mess of Google sites with fractured visual and brand applications, and find a way to pierce the comms spam employees had in their inboxes. 😅
Federated Intranet Search
Unified search across legacy tools (Confluence, Google Drive, Tableau)
Search results weighted by recency, density, support metrics, and number of contributors
Relevance ranked to emphasize authority and avoid outdated results
Custom CMS
Built a WYSIWYG + drag-and-drop hybrid CMS from scratch
Defined 25 core templates and 2x+ reusable components
Designed for full moderation without disrupting author freedom
Cross-device compatibility for mobile authors (esp. field workers)
Developed a lightweight digital asset manager (DAM) integrated directly into the publishing flow
Governance + Branding
Collaborated with Carvana’s design director to align CMS components with their system and extend their design system to incorporate novel interactions from The Dash
Allowed branded modules to be reused across pages (e.g., “Company Benefits” section), with seamless replacement, versioning, and a rich catalogue of assets
Tightened content governance, enabling tagging, versioning, and dynamic reuse; described, documented, and disseminated the decision making and ownership process for The Dash