An overhaul of a system that was last redesigned in 2015.
Designs leverage the Kendo Vue toolkit to comply with United Rentals' internal development team's methodology.
Early analytics are showing as much as a 2,000% reduction in the time it takes for users to complete certain key actions.
United Rentals is the largest equipment rental company in the world. So naturally, they have a large need for a fleet management platform that can handle hundreds of thousands of users with millions of equipment items on rent at any given time — not to mention all the invoices that need paid, reports that need to be tracked, services that need to be provided, all that jazz.
When my team was tasked with the overhaul of that platform, which is called Total Control™, we knew that while the project was huge, our task was simple: get users in and out of the platform as quickly as possible. Those customers log into the tool because they need to get something done: off-rent equipment, pay bills, request service, etc. They aren't casually browsing; they've got shit to do in the real world.
With that in mind, we focused our design efforts on focusing the interface — anticipating what users need to do under given circumstances, and surfacing those actions accordingly. The vast amounts of data in the platform are irrelevant to those customers without the insights to go with it, so we made sure to provide those insights wherever possible, as if a United Rentals rep was sitting down and walking through the data with them, in real time.
When the MVP slice of our new platform launched in early 2025, the first metric we got back was that an action that used to take upwards of 10 minutes on the old platform — finding and paying an outstanding invoice — was taking about 30 seconds on the new one.
We're off to a good start, I think.
Rental rates are complicated. We designed a highly visual rate calendar that revolutionized how United Rentals even talks to its customers about the rental cost lifecycle.
Unlike its predecessor, our redesign focused on little details and interactions, including how it should work on mobile.
We've had to work around some pretty severe limitations in functionality, so we used those moments as opportunities to delight users instead of frustrate them.
