Shopbox: unifying a fragmented POS ecosystem

The challenge. Shopbox served two very different environments. Retail staff needed an interface that was fast and predictable during service, while owners and finance teams needed to manage increasingly complex information across stores, products, transactions and employees. The existing experience had grown unevenly across the POS app and web back-office — the problem was not simply visual inconsistency, the product needed a clearer underlying system.

My role. I joined Shopbox as a designer working across the entire product: redesigning information architecture and interfaces, designing new product flows, conducting research with customers and working closely with development, sales and the CTO on product logic. As the redesign matured, my role gradually expanded into product leadership, including prioritisation, specifications, stakeholder communication and distributed delivery.

The POS lived in a very different environment from a conventional web product. A café or restaurant employee does not want to explore an interface — they need to complete an action quickly while other things are happening around them.

I worked across flows including ordering, tables and rooms, payments, receipts, search, editing, onboarding and different company structures. Interaction decisions prioritised speed, clear status and predictable feedback.

As the redesign became more established, my work increasingly moved upstream. I became more involved in feature opportunities, prioritisation, product specifications, client requirements, communication with development and long-term product direction.

Working with a geographically distributed development team also exposed problems that design files could not solve. That experience later became the subject of my Master's research into distributed software development, and it influenced how I structured specifications and team communication from then on.