What :
Project Overview
A vertically integrated agricultural company — growing its own harvest, producing packaged goods, and distributing them to retail chains — had a serious operational blind spot. Their merchandising field force, the people responsible for product placement, shelf audits, and retail orders, were managing everything through spreadsheets and paper forms. Supervisors had no real-time visibility. Managers couldn't track KPIs. Errors in orders were common and costly.
Problem:
No visibility for managers.
Regional managers had no way to know whether a visit had actually happened, how long it took, or whether the merchandiser was even at the right location. Oversight was based entirely on trust and manual reporting.
Slow, error-prone order creation.
Merchandisers filled in orders by hand or over the phone, leading to frequent mistakes in quantities, product names, and pricing — all of which created downstream supply chain issues.
Zero performance data.
There was no structured way to measure KPIs, visit completion rates, or survey results across a team. Management decisions were made on gut feel.
Goal:
Build a mobile application for merchandisers and supervisors in the field, and a web-based admin panel for managers.
Who :
User Research
I started by running stakeholder workshops with regional managers and operations leads to understand the business process end-to-end. From there I went into the field — conducting interviews with merchandisers and supervisors to understand how they actually worked day-to-day. I also conducted a competitor analysis of existing field force automation tools.
Pain Points
Merchandisers work in environments with poor connectivity
Any solution had to work offline first, syncing when a connection became available.
Supervisors needed to manage multiple field agents simultaneously.
The information hierarchy had to support team-level oversight, not just individual task tracking.
Managers needed a high-level command center
not granular task views — where they could spot problems, review KPIs, and act quickly.
Challenge:
The biggest challenge was designing for two completely different user contexts — a merchandiser standing in a supermarket aisle with one hand free, and a regional manager reviewing overnight results on a laptop — within a single coherent system.
There was also technical constraint because technical team with stakeholders decided to use bootstrap system for faster delivery.
Why :
Key decisions
Two-part digital product from scratch: a mobile application for merchandisers and supervisors in the field, and a web-based admin panel for managers. Together they replaced a fragmented paper-based workflow with a single, connected system.
Two products, two mental models
Field workers needed a focused, step-by-step flow optimized for one-handed use in a retail environment. Managers needed density, filtering, and overview — a tool built for a desk.
Structured visit flow
This flow, visible in the app screens, gave both the merchandiser and the manager a shared, verifiable record of what happened at every point.
Survey and questionnaire builder
One of the more complex features was the in-visit questionnaire system. Managers can build custom surveys from the web panel and assign them to specific retail points or visit types.
Order management with history and diff view
The order creation flow is built around a product catalog with category navigation, search, and quantity controls. Each order is timestamped and linked to the visit that generated it.
Reflection :
What I learned
Getting the design right required spending real time with the people who would use it, understanding a business process that spans fields, factories, and retail shelves, and making hundreds of small decisions about hierarchy, flow, and information density.
This was one of the most complex products I've worked on — not because of visual complexity, but because of the depth of the operational domain. Getting the design right required spending real time with the people who would use it, understanding a business process that spans fields, factories, and retail shelves, and making hundreds of small decisions about hierarchy, flow, and information density.