Equipment Editor

The Starting Point

The equipment editor had been around for over a decade. A small dev team built it with no designers involved, and it showed. The workflow was clunky, the interface was confusing, and new employees had an especially rough time learning it.

Over 350 people used this tool every day, averaging 30-45 minutes per session. Small improvements in efficiency could add up to thousands of hours saved.

Screenshot of the legacy Equipment Editor interface, over 10 years old. Cluttered layout, no design system, cumbersome workflow built by developers without designers.

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How People Actually Worked

Spending time with sales reps and watching them use the tool revealed a few things that shaped the entire redesign.

New hires got hit the hardest. Power users had built muscle memory around the quirks, but onboarding someone new was painful. There was no intuitive path through the quoting process.

Everyone thought in Excel. Users lived in spreadsheets. They exported quotes to Excel. They organized data in rows and columns. Any design that fought that mental model was going to lose.

One location at a time was a bottleneck. The old editor only let you work with one equipment location at a time. For multi-site quotes, that meant repeating the same steps over and over.

Paper Sketches to Prototype

We started with pencil sketches, rough wireframes of table layouts and navigation ideas. Getting concepts in front of stakeholders early and cheaply, before investing real design time, was the goal.

Low-fidelity pencil and paper sketches showing early concept exploration for the Equipment Editor layout, with rough wireframes of table layouts and navigation ideas.

Based on early user feedback, the first real prototype organized equipment in a nested hierarchy: locations as collapsible groups, open quotes as tabs. It made logical sense on paper.

Medium-fidelity nested view prototype with a hierarchical layout. Equipment organized by location in collapsible sections, tabbed quote navigation at the top.

"We Just Want Excel"

The nested view got decent feedback, but stakeholders pushed back. Quotes get exported to Excel at the end of the process, so why should the editor look completely different from the output? They wanted the input to match the output.

Fair point. We scrapped the nested approach and pivoted to a spreadsheet-style layout.

First Excel-style iteration, pivoting from nested view to spreadsheet-like table layout after stakeholder feedback that the output should match the input experience.

The Final Design

Two features defined the final product.

The locations sidebar let users filter and select multiple equipment locations at once. This got the biggest reaction from stakeholders. People had been dealing with the one-location-at-a-time limitation for years.

Locations sidebar component with multi-select location picker replacing the old single-location constraint. Users can filter and select multiple equipment locations simultaneously.

The equipment table brought actual Excel-like functionality into the browser: sorting, filtering, inline editing, multi-select. I worked with our dev team to find a framework that could handle all of that, not just display data. That's what got stakeholders on board.

Equipment data table with a spreadsheet-style interface, sortable columns, inline editing, and Excel-like functionality including filtering, multi-select, and data manipulation.

Final redesigned Equipment Editor interface with spreadsheet-style equipment table, locations sidebar, tab-based quote navigation, and Service Express design system applied.