DAT iQ — Freight Intelligence Platform. Rates, lanes, market conditions, and forecasts unified in a single configurable interface. Built from zero over nine months as a founding design team member.
Joined as a founding team member to design DAT iQ from the ground up — a modular, real-time freight analytics platform that consolidated five legacy tools into a single intelligence layer, and secured millions in executive budget through a multi-year product vision.
In late 2020, DAT Freight & Analytics had a data advantage that most freight technology companies could only aspire to — decades of rate history, real-time load board data, and market intelligence that carriers and brokers relied on daily. What they didn't have was a platform that made any of that data actionable at the speed the market required.
Five legacy products — Rateview, Ratecast, FMIC, MCI, and Lanemakers — each did something useful in isolation. None of them talked to each other. None of them offered the kind of integrated, configurable intelligence that a modern brokerage needed to navigate volatile markets, make pricing decisions, and plan capacity weeks ahead.
Design DAT iQ from the ground up — a modular, real-time, data-driven platform that serves as a strategic business intelligence tool, delivering custom analytics, forecasts, and recommendations. Build not just the product, but the multi-year vision to secure the budget to build it.
I joined as part of the founding team, responsible for the full design — concept to high-fidelity — and for building a vision compelling enough to unlock significant executive investment. Within nine months, we delivered both.
Before any wireframes, we aligned on what success looked like across three dimensions. These weren't decorative goal-setting — they became the filter for every design decision and the framework for the executive pitch that secured the platform's budget.
The most important framing decision we made early was defining what DAT iQ was not. It wasn't a replacement for DAT One — Orderful's tactical load board and daily transaction tool. It was the intelligence layer above it: a strategic toolkit that gave brokers, shippers, and carriers the context to make better decisions before, during, and after their daily operations.
One of the most consequential deliverables wasn't a screen — it was the multi-year roadmap that secured executive buy-in and unlocked the budget to build the platform. We defined three progressive stages that balanced near-term delivery with long-term ambition: a Smallest Lovable Core that consolidated existing tools, a Growth phase that introduced marketplace infrastructure, and a Scale phase that flipped the model inside-out by letting customers build on the platform.
The three-stage vision — presented directly to DAT leadership — was the design artifact that secured millions of dollars in platform development budget. Outlining a clear strategic roadmap demonstrated that DAT iQ wasn't a one-off product, but a long-term platform investment with compounding returns.
With five legacy tools to consolidate and a three-stage vision to architect, the IA work was as much strategic as it was structural. The high-level IA map defined how existing DAT data products would map to the new platform's navigation — dashboards, rates, lanes, notifications, tools, account, and analytics — and color-coded each node against the v1.0, Growth, and Scale delivery phases.
The freight industry isn't monolithic. A carrier planning capacity three months out needs different tools than a broker quoting a spot rate this afternoon. The design system for DAT iQ was built around a core principle of flexibility: modular widgets and configurable dashboards that users could arrange around their specific workflows, without sacrificing depth or analytical power.
Both light and dark themes were designed from the outset — dark for data-dense analytical views, light for lane management and operational contexts. The result was a platform that adapted to the environment and task at hand, rather than imposing a single visual mode on every user interaction.
Early design exploration focused on the dashboard architecture — how to present rate history, lane performance, market conditions, and forecasts in a single configurable view without overwhelming users. The sketches established the widget-based layout, the left navigation model, and the chart/map/table composition that would carry through to final designs.
The custom dashboard was the entry point for every DAT iQ session — a configurable home base where users could surface the metrics most relevant to their role. Rate trends, lane performance, market condition indices, and forecast data were all available as widgets, arranged to match individual workflows.
The rates experience was the core of DAT iQ v1.0 — consolidating Rateview and Ratecast into a single view that could show national rate history, per-lane spot and contract rates, fuel-adjusted figures, and short-term forecasts in a single, filterable interface. The business calendar view gave brokers a forward-looking rate planning tool that didn't exist anywhere in the existing DAT product suite.
Lane management was the operational center of gravity for brokers and shippers who needed to track performance across dozens or hundreds of freight lanes simultaneously. The lanes experience let users build a personal lane portfolio, monitor rate movements and volatility, and drill into individual lane detail with historical performance, market conditions, and forecasted rate changes.
This was the opening line of the executive pitch. It wasn't just positioning copy — it was the north star that oriented every design decision for nine months. Create clarity. Deliver smart notifications. Analyze business performance. Automate action. Optimize transactions.
The vision secured the budget. The design delivered the platform. And the senior designer I hired and onboarded before leaving ensured it continued to evolve after I moved on to Orderful.
DAT iQ was a nine-month zero-to-one build under conditions that required both deep craft and executive-level strategic thinking. The design work wasn't just about screens — it was about convincing a large, established company to invest in a new product category and a new way of thinking about freight intelligence.