Honda Motorcycle - DMS
Rebuilding trust between dealership network and the system they'd stopped using.
ROLE
UX UI Designer | Researcher
Year
2025
TIMELINE
4 Months
Platform
Web — Salesforce Experience Cloud
Tools
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Figma
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FigJam
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Miro
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Salesforce
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SAP
Team
Cross-functional team including:
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UX UI Designer & Research (Myself)
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Business Analyst
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Salesforce Developers
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Dealer Network
Project Overview
Honda's motorcycle division manages thousands of customer enquiries across Australia through a network of 150+ dealerships. Those enquiries flow from Honda's website into Salesforce and land inside a dealer portal — where sales consultants are responsible for picking them up, following up with customers, and converting them into sales.
The problem
The problem was that the portal had never been designed with those consultants in mind. It had grown through technical iterations rather than user-centred thinking, and by the time I joined the project, dealerships had largely stopped relying on it. They were managing leads in spreadsheets, missing follow-ups, and duplicating effort across disconnected systems.
My role was to understand why — and to redesign the experience so the portal could actually do its job.
The Challenge
"We don't trust the system to show us what we need, so we keep our own records." — Sales Consultant, Honda Dealership
The brief was to improve the lead management experience for Honda's dealer network. But before designing anything, I needed to understand the full scope of the problem — which meant getting into the system, talking to the people who used it every day, and visiting dealerships to see how leads were actually being managed on the ground.
Current State
Current State — the existing portal before redesign.
Research & Discovery
What I did:
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Conducted stakeholder interviews with Dealer Principals, Sales Managers, Sales Consultants, and Honda's internal Marketing and Sales Operations teams
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Ran structured discovery sessions with Honda's internal teams to map the system architecture and data flows
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Visited dealerships across Victoria and NSW to observe real workflows in practice — seeing firsthand how consultants were managing leads outside the portal
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Analysed the existing platform through a heuristic evaluation — identifying usability failures against established design principles
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Mapped the end-to-end lead lifecycle across all connected systems: Honda Website → Sitecore → Dealer Net → Salesforce → Dealer Portal → SAP
What I found:
The research surfaced a consistent pattern across every dealership I spoke to. The portal wasn't failing because the technology was broken — it was failing because it had never been designed around how dealership teams actually work.
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Problems Identified
6 Critical gaps in the existing system
DESIGN PROCESS
With the problems clearly defined, I moved into defining the design direction before touching a single screen.
I started with low-fidelity flow mapping in FigJam, working through each key user journey before moving to wireframes. I ran the wireframes past the Honda sales team and a small group of dealership contacts for early feedback before moving to high fidelity.
The final designs were built in Figma using Honda's brand system — dark navigation, red accents, and a clean white content canvas that made data easy to scan.
Lead Journey process flow
KEY SCREENS DESIGNED
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Dealer Dashboard : The dashboard was completely reimagined as an operational control centre. Instead of an empty welcome screen, consultants now land on a page that immediately shows them what's happening — active leads by status, overdue tasks, pending approvals, and today's schedule. Three dashboard states were designed to account for different roles: individual consultant view, sales manager view, and dealer principal view, each surfacing the metrics most relevant to that user.
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Homepage — Today View : A focused daily view that shows each consultant exactly what they need to action that day. Leads requiring first contact, follow-ups due, and overdue items are all surfaced in priority order. The goal was to eliminate the morning ritual of manually scanning lists to find where to start.
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New Leads Page: Incoming leads are now displayed with clear priority indicators — Hot, Warm, or Cold — based on intent signals captured at the point of enquiry (finance interest, purchase timeline, trade-in information). Consultants can immediately see which leads need urgent attention and action them in bulk where needed.
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Leads Filter: Page A powerful filtering system that lets consultants cut through the full lead list by status, model, date range, assigned consultant, and lead temperature. Designed to replace the manual spreadsheet tracking that dealerships were relying on outside the system.
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Add / Search Leads: A redesigned lead capture and search experience that surfaces existing customer records before a new lead is created — reducing duplicate entries at the point of input rather than trying to clean them up afterwards.
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In Progress Leads: A dedicated view for leads that have been accepted and are actively being worked. Activity timelines within each lead record automatically log calls, emails, notes, and tasks — so managers can see exactly what's happened with each customer without chasing consultants for updates.
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Overdue Activities: A dedicated escalation view that surfaces all leads where follow-up is overdue, SLA timers have expired, or no contact has been logged. Automatically flags to both the consultant and their manager — replacing the manual chasing that was previously required.
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Follow Up Page: A structured follow-up interface that prompts consultants to log the outcome of each customer interaction — outcome, next step, and scheduled callback. Designed to make record-keeping feel like a natural part of the workflow rather than an administrative afterthought.
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Opportunity Page & Opportunity Overview: When a lead converts to a qualified opportunity, it moves into a dedicated opportunity view where product configuration, pricing, and SAP stock data are surfaced in context. Consultants can manage the full sales process without switching between systems.
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E-Diary Page: A digital scheduling tool integrated directly into the portal — allowing consultants to manage test drive bookings, follow-up calls, and customer appointments without leaving the platform. Two views designed: a personal diary and a team overview for managers.
Prototype
The prototype is currently in user testing with Sales Consultants, Dealership Managers, and Dealer Principals across the Honda network. Testing is measuring time-to-first-contact, portal adoption rate, and consultant satisfaction scores.
OUTCOME
The redesigned system addresses the core reasons dealerships had stopped trusting the portal. By surfacing the right information at the right time, automating manual processes, and giving consultants and managers a clear view of their pipeline, the new experience is designed to bring lead management back inside the system — where it can be tracked, measured, and improved.
Key projected improvements based on workflow analysis:
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Estimated 25% reduction in time-to-first-contact through automated lead assignment and priority indicators
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Duplicate leads reduced through deduplication logic built into the capture flow
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150+ dealerships nationally impacted by the redesigned workflows
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Activity logging built into the workflow rather than treated as a separate task — improving data quality and reporting accuracy for Honda's national marketing teams
REFLECTION
The most important thing I learned on this project was that a system failing in production is rarely a technology problem. The portal worked. The integration with Salesforce worked. What didn't work was the layer between the technology and the people — and that's exactly where design lives.
Getting into dealerships and watching consultants work was the moment the project became real. No amount of stakeholder interviews or system documentation would have shown me what I saw in person: a sales consultant with a printed spreadsheet on his desk, tracking leads with a highlighter, because he didn't trust the portal to show him what he needed to know.
That image stayed with me through every design decision. If the design couldn't earn back that consultant's trust — if it didn't show him something more useful than his spreadsheet — it wasn't good enough.
I'd also push harder next time for usability testing earlier in the process. We ran testing on the second-stage prototype, but earlier testing on wireframes would have saved us several iteration cycles on the dashboard layout and lead prioritisation logic.