Context

Relay is a customer relationship management platform designed to feel lighter, faster, and more intuitive than legacy CRMs. It targets sales teams, consultants, and agencies who need just enough structure to track leads, conversations, and opportunities — without getting buried in complexity.

The challenge was to design a product that reduced friction, prioritized context, and supported real-world relationship workflows.

Our approach

We kicked off with interviews across sales and account management roles to understand daily habits and pain points. Users were tired of bloated CRMs with too many fields, unclear hierarchies, and poor mobile experiences. Many resorted to spreadsheets or notes apps instead.

We decided to reframe the CRM as a timeline of touchpoints — not just a database. Our design focused on surfacing key signals at the right time: next steps, recent interactions, and deal movement — all without extra digging.

Visual design

Relay’s UI is clean and minimal, using soft greys and bold accent colors for priority states. Each contact, company, and deal has a dedicated page that combines details, activity feed, and task history in a single scrollable view.

We introduced a tabless structure with persistent cards, reducing clicks and helping users move fluidly between records. Status badges, inline actions, and smart autocomplete fields reduce input friction without sacrificing clarity.

The typography system was built for scanability — with strong headers, light sublabels, and consistent spacing to avoid visual noise.

Features and systems

We designed:

• A global search with live filters and recent activity memory

• A pipeline view with drag-and-drop stages and real-time sync

• Smart reminders based on inactivity and contact scoring

• A mini-dashboard showing today’s follow-ups, overdue tasks, and deal momentum

The design system included form elements, avatars, tag styles, and a responsive grid built for both desktop and mobile-first sales workflows. We also defined motion guidelines to support subtle feedback during saves, syncs, and timeline updates.

Outcome

Relay launched to early adopters and saw significantly higher daily active usage than comparable CRMs in the same category. Users cited ease of use, speed, and visibility as standout features. Internally, the product team used the component library to ship faster and more consistently across platforms.