Carvana Dash
Saving seven figures in OpEx with custom software
Carvana (with codeLab303) | UX, Strategy, + Design Leadership | Spring 2023 – Early 2024
Long story short
The setup
Carvana is a 20,000+ person company with a vibrant internal culture. But their knowledge tools were fragmented, costly, and ineffective. How do you unify communication, documentation, and brand culture with a tool no one dreads using AND everyone trusts?
Confluence wasn't trusted, especially by field employees. Google Sites lacked any consistent structure, branding, or usability. Employees didn't know where to find information—and 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.
The problem
Carvana's internal knowledge tools were fragmented, costly, and ineffective. As a result:
Information chaos
Employees didn't know where to find information.
Trust deficit
When they did find it, they didn't trust it.
Conversation fragmentation
Internal conversations devolved into Slack pings or email threads.
Costly licenses
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.
As design and UX lead for the project, I was responsible for:
Discovery
Driving early discovery: user research, content audits, template analysis.
Strategy
Defining a strategic North Star: universal search and authoritative comms.
Design and testing
Leading design sprints, usability testing, and field validation.
CMS design
Designing and specifying the componentized CMS, including moderation workflows and mobile-accessible authoring tools.
Stakeholder alignment
Aligning stakeholders across engineering, HR, and comms.
Visual system
Partnering with Carvana's internal design director to scale the visual system across templates.
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. 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
Established the foundation through rigorous research:
- 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 to dashboard to 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
Outcomes + reflections
One of the most interesting and impactful outcomes of this project was the cultural shift. It isn't the first piece of culture software I'd worked on with Carvana, so I knew that there was a solid and engaging corporate culture. However, there were opportunities to smooth the few moments of friction and frustration employees shared while also improving the visibility of most useful info across all outposts.
With the launch of The Dash, it became the single source of truth across corporate and field teams. Carvana's internal comms gained visibility via high-value front-page real estate. Many of the direct contacts at Carvana are part of a centralized team that now governs the intranet, with continued CMS adoption and extension.
What this work has challenged me to do:
- Build with—and for—20,000 voices
- Ensure inclusion of low-tech users while still satisfying engineers
- Create tools that felt empowering to use, not burdensome to maintain
- Bring consistency to a fragmented ecosystem without enforcing rigidity
By treating intranet design not as a utility, but as an experience worth investing in, we helped shift culture, reduce noise, and build trust at scale.