Designing Auto Repair Shop Management Software
A developer-aware, low-effort, high-impact UX redesign for a booking and management mobile application.
Objective
To transform an existing multi-industry web platform into a streamlined, mobile-first solution that enables auto repair shop owners to manage scheduling, work orders, payments, and customer information efficiently within fast-paced, low-overhead environments.
This work was conducted under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and is shared solely for recruitment and evaluation purposes; the designs and content may not be copied, reused, or distributed.
My Role
UX Research
Product Design
Testing
Tools
Figma
Illustrator
FigJam
Qualtrics survey
ChatGPT
Google sheets
Google docs
Cross-Collaboration
Product
Engineering
Quality Assessment
Sales and marketing
Background & Challenge
Nava 360 is a business management platform built to support a wide range of service industries. However, when introduced to small and medium auto repair shops, its web-based workflows did not align with the realities of how these businesses operate.
Auto repair shop owners typically work in highly dynamic environments, balancing repairs, customer interactions, scheduling, and payments with minimal staff support. Managing operations through a desktop-based system was often impractical, leading many owners to rely on fragmented tools such as spreadsheets, messaging apps, and manual notes.
While Nava 360 already provided the necessary functionality, the experience required time, focus, and structured workflows that did not reflect the shop floor reality. The key challenge was to redesign the experience for mobile-first usage, creating a solution that reduced friction, supported multitasking, and fit naturally into existing work habits
I owned the design process end-to-end for the Nava 360 mobile experience, from research and ideation to prototyping and handoff. Working within a startup environment, I balanced user needs, technical constraints, and business goals to deliver a development-ready, mobile-first solution.
“Job’s done, car’s gone, then I’m like, wait, did he pay or not?”
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“People come back and say, ‘you worked on this before,’ it's a chaos to manage the client ledger”
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“I don’t have someone sitting at a desk managing things for me."
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"Everything is in different apps, WhatsApp, Gmail, bank app, Excel. My head is the only thing connecting them. Half my work is remembering which app to open."
"I’d love if my appointments are scheduled without idle time."
- Auto repair shop owner from Pierrefonds, QC
"How might we translate a feature-rich web platform into a simplified, mobile-first operational system that aligns with real-world business behaviour?"
Nava 360 Business, a mobile-first business management application tailored specifically for small and medium auto repair shops, designed to support owner-operated workflows where a single person manages both repairs and operations.
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A transformation of a complex, web-heavy system into a focused, mobile-ready operational tool that fits naturally into the day-to-day realities of auto repair shop owners with an adoption not only within auto repair shops, but also across other small, owner-led service businesses such as salons, dental clinics, boutiques, and fitness centres.
Final Solution
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Hassle-Free Booking
A one-click booking system that supports appointments, service bookings, car drop-offs, and calendar blocking, designed to reduce bay idle time and keep workshop schedules running efficiently.
All bookings seamlessly translate into work orders, enabling clear coordination of in-house jobs, outsourced technicians, and spare parts, ensuring every task, resource, and dependency is planned and tracked in one place.
Tracking Work Orders
This function is inevitable as shop owners manage multiple jobs, technicians, parts, and approvals at the same time. A single work-order view brings all job details, tasks, estimates, invoices, media, and actions into one place, making progress easy to track without relying on memory or switching tools.
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Clear Estimates, Faster Payments
Pricing details are often unclear, scattered, or handled at the end of the day, leading to mistakes, delays, and payment follow-ups. This feature enables shop owners to create clear, itemized estimates and seamlessly convert them into invoices directly from the work order management, keeping labor, parts, and additional charges transparent and easy to track.
Manage Customers Like a Pro
Client profiles store vehicle history, previous jobs, invoices, payments etc. in one place. In-app chat keeps every message tied to the right customer jobs and vehicle, so updates, approvals, and reminders stay organised without switching apps.
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A Significant Web to Mobile Transition
All web platform functionalities were translated into a mobile-first UI, prioritizing speed, clarity, and real-world usage over feature density.
The Process
Key Research Insights
We conducted qualitative interviews with auto repair shop owners in and around Montréal, QC to understand their day-to-day workflows, from handling appointments and service bays to invoicing and job tracking.
6/7
participants manage appointments, service bays, and customer communication themselves, without a dedicated front-desk or administrative role.
7/7
participants relied on multiple disconnected tools (phone calls, WhatsApp, Excel, email, bank apps) to run daily operations.
6/7
participants handled invoicing and payment tracking after working hours, increasing the risk of delays and errors.
7/7
participants used their mobile phone as the primary business device, with desktops or laptops accessed only occasionally.
4/7
participants relied heavily on memory to recall customer history, previous vehicle repairs, payment status or previous appointments.
User Persona
Based on the interview insights we came with a user persona "Marc Dubois", that would help us design the tailored auto repair shop management application
Storyboarding Marc's Journey
To understand how auto repair shop owners move through their day, we storyboarded the end-to-end customer journey with the help of Generative AI, from the first interaction to job completion and follow-ups. We tried to compare these journeys without and with Nava 360 mobile application. This helped identify friction points and moments where mobile-first support could reduce effort and cognitive load.
Building Information Architecture
The information architecture was designed around the realities of a single-owner auto repair shop, where one person manages repairs, customers, scheduling, and payments, often simultaneously and from the shop floor.
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Rather than mirroring the complexity of the web platform, the mobile IA prioritises speed, visibility, and task continuity, ensuring the most frequent actions are always one tap away.
Design and Develop
Once the information architecture was finalized, we reused the design system created for Nava 360, client application to ensure consistency across the brand, typography, components, and interactions. This also supported developers by enabling reusable style guides and CSS properties, reducing implementation effort and improving maintainability.
We created low-fidelity mockups and wireframed for key process flows. This step helped us the freeze user flows and allowed us start designing hi-fi mockups to handover it to the developers.
Next Steps
Once the low-fidelity mockups were translated into high-fidelity prototypes, the designs were delivered to developers through a detailed presentation, with ongoing support to explain flows and logic as needed. The product is currently under development, and the next phase involves usability testing and benchmarking the new app against the previous version and competitor apps to achieve maximum usability and a effortless user experience.
Key Takeaways
Following the KISS principle, Keep-it-Simple-Stupid, this project reinforced how technology doesn’t need to be complex to be powerful, it needs to fit naturally into real-world workflows. Designing for auto repair shop owners highlighted the importance of mobile-first UX, where speed, clarity, and accessibility matter more than feature depth. Real-world settings demand experiences that work in moments of distraction, fatigue, and multitasking, not ideal conditions. UX decisions have a direct impact on whether a product is actually used, if it isn’t effortless on mobile, it simply won’t be adopted. This project strengthened my ability to design within constraints, aligning user needs with existing systems and technical realities.