Cohesiv – No-code app builder
Cohesiv is a no-code app builder, designed to help our team rapidly deliver custom enterprise solutions to Factory Bucket’s manufacturing, logistics, and aerospace and defence clients.
Factory Bucket Inc.
2021
Summary
Mission / Business goals
Cohesiv’s initial goal was to help our team build custom ERP software for manufacturing, logistics, and aerospace clients—saving them the time and cost of traditional development. Long term, we aimed to release Cohesiv as a B2C web app, allowing companies and third-party builders to use the platform through a subscription model.
MY ROLE
As the only designer on the team, I led the end-to-end design and research of this product from start to finish. I collaborated closely with product, engineering and our CEO.
Core responsibilities: User research, competitor research & analysis, UI design, prototyping, usability testing, and design QA.
Role
Design Owner, Product Designer
Project Team
Product Manager & Development Team.
Timeline
8 Months
My impact
62% fasterDevelopment with Cohesiv was 62% faster on average than traditional development.
$4.2M savedAnnual average client savings by developing custom software with Cohesiv (across 4 clients).
My process for this project
This was a complex, eight-month effort involving extensive research, ideation, and testing. By interviewing no-code power users and analyzing clients’ existing ERP challenges, I identified the core pain points manufacturers face—insights that guided the product’s foundation.
Problem
Two rounds of user interviews and a survey confirmed what we’d been hearing from clients: traditional ERPs are outdated, expensive, and inflexible. Running a business on manual tools like Excel or whiteboards also makes teams slow to adapt and hard to manage.
I also uncovered key pain points with no-code competitors, including limited customization, minimal support resources, and the need to stitch together multiple tools like Knack & Integromat, or Zapier to make workflows work.
siloed ERP, or no digital solution
Manufacturers often rely on disconnected ERP tools—or worse, whiteboards and spreadsheets—leaving data siloed and workflows fragmented.
Rigid software
Manufacturers’ unique processes rarely fit rigid ERP systems, forcing teams to adapt to the software instead of the other way around.
ERP solutions are slow and costly
ERP implementations are time-consuming, expensive, and frequently fall short of meeting business goals.
Custom development is expensive
While large manufacturers can afford custom solutions, most cannot. Custom builds are costly and take too long to deliver.
Challenge
How might we design a product that fills in the gaps left by traditional ERP software, is adaptable, less expensive and easier to implement?
Solution
Manufacturers need software that adapts to their processes, integrates with existing systems for full visibility, automates workflows, and provides custom solutions without the high cost of traditional ERPs or custom development.
Our solution is a no-code enterprise application that will allow Factory Bucket employees and, eventually, third-party implementors to rapidly create custom software solutions without writing a single line of code.
Persona
I used our research and survey insights to create a product persona, helping the team align around our target user. While the initial launch was an internal tool for Factory Bucket, we designed with the future in mind—planning for Cohesiv to eventually become a subscription-based B2B and B2C web app for companies and third-party builders.
Workspaces
Workspaces let users organize their projects—whether they’re internal tools or client-facing ERP apps for managing logistics, inventory, fulfillment, sales pipelines, and more.
Each workspace can be customized with a title, icon, and description. Users can also access their Workflow dashboard with key information such as error logs for debugging, third-party integrations, user insights, and most-visited pages.
This dashboard design was a concept that was cut to reduce scope for MVP.
Views
This feature is a visual web-app builder that allows users to create pages, modals, emails, and other visual interface elements for their enterprise applications.
Users can arrange elements through drag-and-drop or manage their structure in the layers panel.
The properties panel is contextual and lets users style the selected components and containers.
The plus button opens a modal of pre-built components—such as flex containers, buttons, and tables—making it easy to assemble custom solutions quickly.
Viewflows
A viewflow connects everything from simple page navigation to fully automated, multi-step workflows.
Viewflows let users define the steps in a user flow, such as completing a compliance report or adding items to an inventory tracker by connecting views (pages). They also handle behind-the-scenes automation, like updating spreadsheets or sending manager notifications when an invoice is paid.
To keep the viewflow legible when the user zooms out, I simplified the design to only show the icon representing the node action.
Retrospective
This project was a major turning point in my growth as a product designer. Over its course, I sourced and vetted test participants and conducted multiple rounds of user interviews and usability sessions. I built a design system, learned directly from users by observing their pain points, and refined my collaboration skills through ongoing presentations and working sessions with developers and stakeholders.
The experience also revealed important areas for self-improvement. I learned that my low-fidelity designs often became too polished too early, and that committing more time to early wireframing made later iterations far more efficient.
Since completing this work, the app builder, Cohesiv, has continued to evolve and is now an AI-powered platform. Looking back, this project laid a strong foundation for my craft and shaped how I approach research, systems thinking, and iterative design today.