Case Study
From outdated to award-winning
iTradeNetwork Platform
Product
Order Management System (OMS)
Product design
User research & testing
Stakeholder management
Interactive prototyping
Design mentorship
Timing
September 2022 – Present
Collaborators
Andrew Villegas, Oliver Lewis, Anitha Parimi, Venkat Pininty, Amir Rashidifar
My role
UX/UI Design Lead
About
iTradeNetwork is the digital backbone of the food supply chain in the US and Canada
iTradeNetwork connects the world’s largest retailers, distributors, and suppliers through a unified platform that brings order management, procurement, logistics, and traceability into one seamless system. In an industry where speed, freshness, and accuracy are non-negotiable, we help our partners reduce waste, cut costs, and make smarter decisions—faster.
Simply put: if you’ve eaten today, iTradeNetwork probably helped make that happen.
The problem
Obsolete, fragmented, and misaligned
Just five years ago, iTradeNetwork faced a strategic risk hiding in plain sight: a fragmented product experience that was silently eroding customer trust and lifetime value.The platform had grown through years of modular development—but without a unified design or user experience strategy. Each module operated independently, with its own interface, logic, and workflows. To our customers, this wasn’t a platform—it was a disconnected collection of tools. The result was operational inefficiency, increased training costs, and rising user frustration.
More critically, the organization lacked proximity to its users. Beyond the sales cycle, there were no structured feedback loops, no direct user research, and no visibility into the day-to-day realities of those running complex, time-sensitive supply chains. We were shipping features without understanding the jobs our users were hiring us to do.
This disconnect had real financial consequences. Churn climbed to 8%—a clear signal of product-market misalignment in a space where retention should be a strength. We weren’t losing customers to better products—we were losing them to better experiences.
Without a course correction, the cost was compounding: lower NPS, slower adoption, longer onboarding, and a weakening competitive position in a category that rewards clarity, speed, and trust.
The problem solution
Outdated, fragmented, and misaligned
When iTradeNetwork brought me on in 2019 to establish its first-ever product design team, I worked closely with our sales and customer success teams to gain crucial access to our end users. We immediately launched into essential user research, analytics, and information architecture, applying UX best practices and conducting user interviews to deeply understand and tackle the most pressing usability challenges.
Designers took ownership of their respective applications within the iTradeNetwork platform, beginning with heuristic evaluations, then crafting design artifacts informed by market trends and user behaviors and attitudes—ultimately shaping the future of iTradeNetwork’s products.
Collaborating with the CPO and CEO, I secured a travel budget for my team to visit dozens of clients for contextual inquiries—an invaluable initiative for understanding user pain points across purchasing, accounting, logistics, sales, and analytics roles. This research led to the development of several new features to address critical gaps, strengthening client appreciation and renewing trust in iTradeNetwork.
Contextual Inquiry Highlights
User-validated insights
User-validated insights
User-validated insights
The design solution
Creating a first-in-class SaaS Experience
We started reimagining the iTradeNetwork platform based on our research findings, involving several major clients along the way for validation.
We didn’t stop there. With AI on the horizon, the team moved quickly to provide additional value across our platform, making us the industry’s first supply chain SaaS company to provide automated AI tasks.
A period of innovation began that continues to this day.
Ensuring visual and functional consistency
After performing heuristic evaluations and user feedback sessions, product designers created a unified library of reusable components, styles, and patterns for use across the platform. We partnered with our marketing team to ensure color palettes, typography, and imagery were supporting our newly redesigned branding.
This transformation not only to improved accessibility and user experience, but also to expedite design and development exponentially for the organization.
Data analytics and reporting streamlined for busy users
Our users juggle mutliple applications, devices, and modes of communication throughout the day, with little to no time to invest in data analysis.
So we packaged several data insights, highlighting the KPIs they’re responsible for right in the portal.
Modernizing the way our supplier users get paid in iTradeNetwork
The traditional process of invoicing and payment can take up to 30 days – which means suppliers are losing critical income that could be invested in growing their business on the table. I proposed the idea of adding payments processing on the platform.
More importantly, adding Payments created an entirely new revenue stream for the company, whose profits are transactionally based.
Agents, Automated Orders, customized data analysis
Our users juggle mutliple applications, devices, and modes of communication throughout the day, with little to no time to invest in data analysis.
So we packaged several data insights, highlighting the KPIs they’re responsible for right in the portal.
Putting pixel-perfection at designers' fingertips
The product design team was spending several cycles doing design audits to fix UI bugs and other issues by engineering. It was a frustrating and slow process, but necessary to achieve the level of quality designers wanted.
Using Locofy (a tool that generates code from Figma files) instead of our legacy handoff process reduced engineering time by 90% – while giving complete quality control to product designers.
Watch the transformation
User-validated insights
The outcome
Decreased time on task, increased user satisfaction
Investing in user testing allowed us to set benchmarks that clearly showcased the impact of our UX improvements in the redesigned applications.
Beyond modernizing the platform with a complete UX overhaul and a fresh design system, our goal was to position iTradeNetwork as a tech leader in the industry. We focused on leveraging cutting-edge technology to harness the valuable data generated from millions of transactions across the platform. Collaborating with a data scientist, we gained a deeper understanding of the value and limitations of our platform data, which led to the creation of several invaluable AI-driven features.
Ultimately, we won two awards for our work.
Best UX/UI SaaS Product Finalist
CloudAwards, 2024
Best SaaS Website Award Winner
WebAwards, 2024
New vs Legacy Platform Improvements
Average of baseline UserTesting results for OMS, Order Maestro, and Freight applications
More task completions
Less Time on Task
Higher SUS Score
Lessons learned
Keep pushing for....
Amir to write