A CRM Worth Navigating · Yunlei Shen

The tool five teams live in

Sugar holds everything: leads, veterans, claims, documents, disabilities. It grew field by field, shaped by whoever needed something that week, and no one had ever stepped back to ask what shape it should have. By the time I took it on, the structure itself was the cost — in productivity, in morale, and eventually in submissions.

The hard part was never the diagnosis. It was that five teams had built eight-hour-a-day habits inside this structure, and any fix worth doing would break all of them at once.

Owned

IA redesignResearch & card sortingNew sitemapPage-layout logicRollout plan

Partnered on

Engineering buildRole permissions — companion case

Constraint

SugarCRM let us restructure navigation, pages, and fields — not the record model.

What was actually broken

Interviews and field studies with each role surfaced three structural problems:

One navigation for everyone. Crowded with links most roles never used; no secondary navigation; the same features in different places on different pages.

Everything was deep. Key information sat 3–5 clicks away; related content was scattered; critical actions like upload had no consistent home.

Key details hidden in plain sight. Pages omitted basics like file names or the associated veteran; sorting followed no logic users recognized.

Before: the veteran claim detail page

Previous Sugar CRM veteran claim detail page

↕Scroll to see the full page

Twelve top-level menus, a thirteen-stage status bar, and four tabs of fields, the density that pushed everyday work four to six clicks deep.

Previous IA: mapped from the live system Four clicks or deeper

Home

Dashboard for all roles

1 click

Leads

List view

Accounts

List view

Claims

List view

Documents

List view

Disabilities

List view

2 clicks

Lead View

DetailsLegacy

Account View

DetailsActivityClaimsAppointmentsDBQ CategoriesLegacy

Claim View

DetailsRelatedDBQ CategoriesAppointmentsLegacy

Document View

RelatedDetails

Disability View

DetailsRelated

3 clicks

Notes

DBQ Categories

DBQ Category View

DetailsDisabilitiesLegacy

4 clicks

Documents

Disability History

5 clicks

Document View

Notes

6 clicks

Documents → DBQ Categories

Patch, restructure, or replace

A new IA from heuristics would have taken a week, the problems were that visible. But five teams would have to relearn the tool they use eight hours a day, and a designer’s opinion would not survive that fight. Evidence would. First, the path:

A Ruled out

Patch the worst pages

Low risk, no retraining — and no ceiling raised. The problems were architectural; this is polishing rooms in a house with a broken floor plan.

Fixes symptoms, not the plan.

B Chosen

Restructure the IA inside SugarCRM

The platform let us rebuild navigation, pages, and fields, but not the record model. Months of work, five teams retrained.

Months of work — and the ceiling comes down.

C Ruled out

Replace the CRM entirely

Floated by ops leadership. But every documented problem was structural, not platform-specific — and a mid-year data migration the business could not afford.

New tool, same rot.

Rebuilding the map before the rooms

Waypoint 01: Chart the terrain

Let users draw the architecture, card sorting across roles

Participants from every role sorted each page and feature around their real workflows. The new IA came straight from their mental models and put every key page within two clicks.

Step 1: scrambled cards, sorted by role

Every page, field, and action as a card

Lead listNotification iconClaim IDUpload documentsVeteran infoLog a callDoc uploaderMark as completeDiagnosis nameClinicsProgress barAppointment date & timeLast contact attemptNetworksChecklistHomepageDisability flagAccount ownerPaymentEvents

Where participants put them

Home

TasksRecent claimsNotificationsSearch

Claims

Claim nameClaim statusVeteran infoProgress bar

Documents

Document nameDoc uploaderUpload dateSearch

Disability

Disability nameDiagnosis nameDate acceptedRelated documents

Pattern

Roles grouped differently, by task type or by frequency, but identity fields (who the veteran is, which claim, what file) landed at the top of every sort.

Step 2: the resulting IA, nothing deeper than two clicks

1 click

Home Claims Accounts Disabilities Documents

2 clicks

Veteran Invoices
Veteran Payments
Networks
Clinics

Claim View

Subnavigation
Claim key info
Progress bar
Success checklist

Mark as complete

Work board: details, documents, disabilities, appointments, activities

Account View

Subnavigation
Account key info
Details

Edit button

History: claims, appointments, documents, activity

Document View

Subnavigation
Document key info
Details · preview
Activity

Accept · reject · edit

Disability View

Subnavigation
Disability key info
Diagnosis details
Related documents

Reviewed · create diagnosis · upload

New

Actions in green did not exist before, they were buried in menus or handled outside the system entirely.

Result

What used to sit four to six clicks down now lives on the record itself; nothing important is more than two clicks from the homepage.

Waypoint 02: Redraw the main roads

Rebuilding the top level

Navigation keeps only the most used links; the homepage now leads with work progress, key updates, and each role's top pages. The day starts there, not three menus deep.

Waypoint 03: Fit each room to its use

Match the layout to the data, not the template

One rule settled every page debate: pages people act on get cards with key info on the face; pages people scan keep tables, plus the identity columns every sort demanded. Deciding the rule first meant no layout ever got relitigated.