Lighthouse

I joined with a proposition and no product. There was no existing design, no component library, and no established interface language on any of the three surfaces. The scope was end to end across all of them, which came to 130 or more screens on the business portal alone plus complete mobile and web app experiences, delivered as the sole designer.

For resellers, the operational load is the problem. Managing inventory across multiple brands means juggling different catalogs, pricing structures, variants, and availability statuses without a unified tool. Getting authorized by a new brand involves back-and-forth email, physical document submission, and long waits with no visibility into approval status. Quote requests arrive through WhatsApp and phone calls, competing quotes are invisible, SLA windows are tight, and there is no analytics layer to tell a reseller their win rate or how competitive their pricing actually is.

For brands, distribution is paper-heavy. Authorizing resellers has no centralized system for verifying credentials, tracking authorization across regions, or managing compliance documents such as GSTIN, PAN, and business registration certificates. Catalog management runs on spreadsheets or legacy systems with no bulk upload, no variant handling for size, grade, finish, and color, and no visibility into product performance across the reseller network.

Underneath all three sits the same structural failure. The quotation lifecycle, from requesting a quote through comparing responses, tracking the order, verifying delivery, and handling disputes, is scattered across WhatsApp messages, phone calls, and spreadsheets. Nothing tracks an RFQ through its stages, so quotes get lost, follow-ups get missed, responses arrive late, and delivery disputes have no record to settle against.

The constraint on all of it was breadth. Three products, three user groups, three interface contexts, all built from scratch by one designer.

The **mobile app** serves the professional on site. An AI-powered material planner works as a guided conversation rather than a form, taking space type, budget, and style preference, accepting floor plan uploads, and returning a complete material requirement list with brand-specific suggestions. A curated marketplace organises products by category with transparent starting-from pricing in rupees and stock indicators. A material board holds materials across multiple projects and phases with cost summaries. A social layer carries verified professional profiles, project posts, and short-form Bytes content. Resellers get their own mobile view for active RFQs, brand authorization status, product analytics, and inventory. All of it works in dark and light mode, because the same person uses it on a construction site and at a desk.

The **web app** is the desktop counterpart for the same professional audience. It pairs a content-rich feed of posts, project showcases, and Bytes with a full marketplace browsable by category, application, and brand. Product pages carry variants, installation availability, delivery timelines, specifications, reviews, and a nearby-reseller map. Professional profiles hold tabbed portfolios and project metadata including certifications such as LEED and GRIHA. A persistent right sidebar keeps Active RFQs, a Resellers Near Me map, and global search on every screen, so procurement context stays visible rather than living in a section users have to navigate to.

The **business portal** serves the supply side and is the largest of the three at 130 or more screens. Both brands and resellers enter through one structured four-step registration covering personal and business information, professional overview, legal information, and review, collecting GSTIN and VAT certificates, PAN cards, business registration, authorized signatory IDs, and brand authorization letters in a single session. A pre-registration checklist front-loads document gathering, and applicants track approval through a visible timeline. Past onboarding, the portal splits: brands manage catalogs with SKU, category, MRP, reseller count, publish status, and bulk upload, plus a reseller network module handling regional authorization, categories, documents, and activity history. Resellers manage brand authorization requests with clear approved, pending, and rejected states, inventory with variant-level control, and the RFQ queue filtered by New, Near SLA, Quoted, Won, Rejected, and Expired.

The portal runs on a dark-theme visual language distinct from the light consumer surfaces, and the whole platform is built for Indian business workflows natively: rupee currency, GSTIN and PAN compliance, city and state level authorization, and local entity types including Private Ltd, LLP, Partnership, and Proprietorship.

Compliance-heavy onboarding is an information design problem before it is a form design problem. I initially thought about registration as a flow to optimise, when the actual failure was users starting without the documents the flow would eventually demand. Moving the requirement in front of the flow rather than distributing it through the flow was a small structural change that addressed the real cause. It shifted how I think about drop-off generally: the fix often sits before the step where the drop-off shows up.