Customer
TransTrack Systems is a transit business-intelligence company based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Since 2002 it has helped public transit agencies collect, report, and analyze their operations and performance data, powering everything from National Transit Database (NTD) reporting to transit asset management and performance KPIs through its flagship product, TransTrack Manager.
Challenge
Like many established enterprise-software companies, TransTrack faced the challenge of carrying a powerful but dated application into a modern, cloud-based era. Its EAM tool was data-dense by nature (grids, edit screens, filters, and controls that transit staff rely on every day), and it needed to look and feel as capable as it actually was. TransTrack wanted a more professional, modern, and intuitive interface, but more than a coat of paint: it needed a consistent, repeatable design system that would let its team migrate the EAM tool quickly and lay a foundation for future enhancements across the wider product line. And because TransTrack serves many different agencies, the new system had to accommodate per-customer branding and colors without fragmenting the design.
The catch was time. This was a fast, focused effort, not a months-long redesign, so the work had to move from discovery to development-ready design in a matter of weeks.
Solution
Lightning Jar ran the engagement as four one-week sprints, from discovery through handoff, delivering strategy, design, and front-end prototypes.
Discovery and use cases. Lightning Jar began with a stakeholder workshop to understand the EAM tool's features, functionality, and primary customer use cases, using that shared understanding to prioritize the screens and patterns that mattered most.
Design system and style guide. The core of the work was a new design system of repeatable elements (typography, color palette, layout and grids, iconography, buttons, input and form fields, menus, tooltips, and interaction states), plus a treatment for per-customer branding and customer-selected colors. Lightning Jar delivered this as a documented pattern library and style guidelines, so consistency could be maintained long after the engagement.
Mockups and interactive prototypes. Rather than static comps alone, Lightning Jar worked in a combination of design mockups and code-based prototypes: mockups for quickly sketching ideas, and live prototypes for pixel-perfect styling, real interactivity, and the ability to roll out style changes across many elements at once. The work focused on the data-dense heart of the product: the global header and footer, primary navigation and information architecture, the data grid, edit screens, sort, filter, and search controls, pagination, toolbars and icons, and error states. The prototypes and style guide were built on modern front-end stacks (a Vue, Vite, and Tailwind component prototype, and a companion SvelteKit-based style-guide site), so the deliverable was living, buildable code, not just pictures.
Design implementation support. Because TransTrack's own engineering team handled the build and integration, Lightning Jar reserved time to work alongside them: answering questions, reviewing builds, and providing feedback to ensure the design was implemented faithfully as the EAM tool migrated into the cloud platform.
Results
A reusable design system and documented style guide that standardizes TransTrack's UI and speeds integration of the EAM tool.
A modern, cleaner, more intuitive interface for a data-dense enterprise application, purpose-built for the screens transit staff use most.
Development-ready deliverables (mockups plus live code-based prototypes) that TransTrack's engineering team could build and integrate directly.
A per-customer branding treatment that lets many transit agencies see their own colors without breaking design consistency.
A foundation for future enhancements across the broader TransTrack ecosystem, delivered in a matter of weeks.