A Unified Listing Framework That Shrinks Onboarding and Speeds Delivery

Imagine opening five different products inside the same dashboard, and each one behaves differently. Sorting, filtering, exporting… same actions feel unfamiliar every time. Instead of focusing on their jobs, users were busy re-learning the tool. For them, this meant longer training time, slower adoption, and unnecessary frustration.

The Problem

Over time, each product had been designed independently. Every designer tried to improve one thing or the other, but those improvements were rarely shared across the product suite. While this solved immediate needs, it created a fragmented ecosystem. Updates lived in silos and over time, the products began to look and behave differently from one another.

For many of our users, this created an added burden. Operations teams and managers are not heavy software users in their day-to-day jobs. Dashboards are often overwhelming to begin with, and when the same basic actions behaved differently across products, the learning curve became even steeper. What should have been a smooth workflow turned into a cycle of confusion and retraining.

For customers, this inconsistency didn’t just add clicks, it slowed operations at scale. Every extra training hour or support ticket meant delayed deliveries and a direct hit to efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Training new teams slowed down rollouts. Support staff spent too much time answering repetitive questions instead of focusing on higher-value issues. Developers kept rebuilding the same solutions rather than driving new innovation.

The result was slower adoption for customers and slower delivery for Locus.

Research

We spoke with users, support, and sales teams to understand the impact. The frustration was consistent across roles:

• Operations managers wanted familiarity: “I just want all tables to behave the same way. In one product I can shift-select multiple rows, in another I can’t. It slows me down.”
• Support teams reported repetitive tickets: “We spend more time teaching people where the export button is than how to use the insights.”
• Sales teams found demos dragged on because each product required extra explanation. “When every product behaved differently, demos slowed down. We spent extra time explaining navigation instead of focusing on how Locus could add value to their operations.”

The insights were clear:

Inconsistency wasn’t just an experience problem. It was a scalability bottleneck for both our users and our teams.

We also benchmarked multiple tools like Notion and Airtable, which are widely recognised for handling complex data while remaining easy to use. The lesson was simple: Consistency reduces friction. Familiarity builds trust.

The Solution

Our Approach

We knew that a simple component library would not be enough. To truly solve the problem, we had to align at a higher level: patterns, workflows, and even full page structures.

Our process began by:

1. Studying best practices from leading SaaS tools.
2. Mapping common user needs across all Locus products.
3. Identifying and positioning essential functions that needed to work consistently (sort, filter, bulk actions, exports, etc).
4. Defining patterns and reusable page structures so everything felt familiar from one product to other.

This meant moving from “reusable components” to reusable page structures and patterns, ensuring that whether a user was managing orders, shipments, or invoices, the underlying interactions felt predictable and trustworthy.

Guiding Principles

The solution was a Unified Listing Framework, a reusable foundation that every Locus product can build upon.

The framework was guided by three principles:

• Consistency: core actions like sort, filter, and export now behave the same across all modules.
• Efficiency: bulk actions save hours of manual work. Instead of downloading spreadsheets and editing them offline, operations teams can complete updates in just a few clicks.
• Flexibility: each product can include or exclude features as needed, while keeping the overall experience predictable.

The Design Solution

To bring consistency across products, we standardized several core interface elements and interaction patterns. The main header now includes a persistent team filter for easy context switching. Key actions such as page refresh, create/upload, and product-specific actions have consistent placement, along with universally accessible features like search, export, and an overflow menu containing help guides, feedback options, and keyboard shortcuts.

We also introduced a unified toolbar that consolidates all data table interactions, including view switching, sorting, filtering, column management, and row density controls, ensuring users always know where to find essential tools. Data within tables is now grouped clearly by status and sub-status, improving scannability and reducing cognitive load. Pagination was also improved, with consistent controls for navigating to the first, previous, next, and last pages, as well as adjusting rows per page. Together, these changes weren’t just about visual alignment. They represented a fundamental shift to a shared system, ensuring a familiar and efficient experience across the entire Locus ecosystem.

This was not just a design refresh. It was a platform shift, moving away from siloed solutions to a shared system that accelerates adoption for customers and delivery for Locus.

Impact

The improvements were quickly visible.

• Reduced training effort: Onboarding became noticeably faster, with onboarding teams reporting training times cut by nearly a third in some rollouts. Once users learned how to sort or filter in one module, they could apply the same pattern everywhere, building confidence and reducing training fatigue.
• Increased adoption & trust: Support teams saw fewer tickets for basic actions, freeing them to focus on higher-value issues. Sales teams reported that demos ran more smoothly because prospects could immediately recognize familiar patterns instead of pausing to learn new ones. Training costs fell, and adoption accelerated.
• Time saved for design & dev: Internal teams benefited too. Designers and developers stopped reinventing the wheel, saving time by working from a shared foundation. New products launched more quickly, and delivery cycles became more efficient.

What once felt like a collection of separate tools now functions as one seamless ecosystem, helping customers move faster and helping Locus scale smarter.

 Key Takeaways

• In enterprise software, consistency is not cosmetic, it is a growth enabler.
• Reusable frameworks lower training costs, improve adoption, and accelerate delivery.
• System-level design creates value beyond the interface by shaping customer trust, operational efficiency, and long-term scalability.

At Locus, design is not just about interfaces. It is about building systems that help logistics teams work smarter today and prepare for tomorrow’s supply chain challenges at scale.