Designing seamless navigation for Dealer-FX’s OnePlatform

When Dealer-FX set out to evolve OnePlatform, their suite of tools for automotive service lane management, the challenge was clear: how do we bring multiple powerful workflows—scheduling, inspections, parts, payments—into one intuitive experience?

The answer began with rethinking navigation. Navigation isn’t just a menu—it’s how users mentally map the product, find what they need, and feel confident using it daily. This case study outlines how we used card sorting, information architecture, and iterative design to create OnePlatform’s main navigation.

OnePlatform had grown quickly, expanding into a robust system serving service advisors, technicians, parts managers, and dealership leadership. With so many roles and workflows, the previous navigation was:

• Too flat: All features were presented equally, forcing users to hunt.
• Inconsistent: Some tools were grouped by function, others by workflow.
• Not role-aware: Users had to sort out what was relevant to their job on their own.

We needed a clear, scalable, role-friendly navigation model.

We began with a card sort study across dealership staff roles. Each feature and workflow of OnePlatform was placed on a card (both physical and digital via OptimalSort), and participants were asked to group them in ways that made sense to them.

• Participants: Service advisors, fixed-ops directors, technicians, and parts coordinators.
• Method: Open card sort first (participants create their own categories), followed by a closed card sort (testing predefined categories).
• Outcome: Clear patterns emerged. For example, “Appointment Scheduling” and “Check-In” were always grouped together, while “Reporting” consistently landed in its own category.

This gave us the first look at the mental model dealerships naturally use to organize their work.

With card sort results in hand, we created an information architecture (IA) that reflected these natural groupings while keeping scalability in mind.

Key principles we followed:

1. Workflow over feature – Users think in terms of their process (“checking in a customer”), not individual tools.
2. Role alignment – Each role should see their most-used workflows up front.
3. Progressive disclosure – Advanced features tucked away, not overwhelming first-time users.

The IA took the shape of four top-level navigation buckets:

• Service Lane (appointments, check-in, inspections)
• Parts & Pricing (catalog, estimates, orders)
• Communications (status updates, customer messaging, approvals)
• Management (reporting, settings, role permissions)

We translated the IA into the main navigation system.

• Primary Navigation: A persistent sidebar with the four main categories.
• Secondary Navigation: Contextual menus within each section. For example, within “Service Lane” users could quickly move between “Today’s Appointments” and “Vehicle Check-In.”
• Role-Based Views: Certain items surfaced or hidden based on user type. Technicians saw inspections front-and-center, while fixed-ops directors had immediate access to reporting.

We validated the design with tree tests, asking participants to find common tasks in the prototype. Success rates improved significantly over the previous design, with faster task completion times and fewer misclicks.

By starting with card sorting, grounding decisions in information architecture, and validating through tree testing, we created a navigation system that made OnePlatform feel unified, intuitive, and tailored to the diverse needs of dealership staff.

Navigation went from being a barrier to becoming a strategic enabler of adoption and satisfaction—a quiet but critical win for the OnePlatform experience.

• Card sorting is invaluable: Even when results aren’t perfect, they reveal users’ natural categories.
• Navigation must scale: Designing IA isn’t just about today’s features—it’s about tomorrow’s growth.
• Role-specific design increases efficiency: Not every user needs the same map.