Purno · Product Designer
A retail operating platform for fragmented payments, sales, and inventory flows
Purno was designed as an all-in-one retail chain management product for Bangladeshi merchants dealing with fragmented payment methods, inconsistent tooling, and low-tech-adoption environments. As the first product designer, I worked directly with the founder to set the first screens and turn a loose vision into a coherent cross-platform product direction — through research, information architecture, iterative testing, and localized UX decisions.
VC-backed
Design work supported funding conversations
20%
Faster item discovery after category redesign
Cross-platform
Retail, merchant, and payment experiences aligned
Localized
UX calibrated to low-tech-adoption Bangladeshi retailers
Product Screens
Core retail and merchant flows
The full product spanned retail chain management, payment processing, inventory, reporting, and a separate merchant app for individual store operators.
Merchant app
Problem
Retailers were managing payments and sales through fragmented workflows that were hard to scale.
In Bangladesh, merchants often accept payments through cash, bank transfers, mobile banking, and digital wallets — but those channels rarely resolve into a unified operational experience. Purno aimed to consolidate payments, inventory, sales, and reporting into one system that could work across desktop, tablet, and mobile without requiring expensive dedicated POS hardware.
The product had to work for retailers with low technical confidence. This made ease of use, transaction speed, navigation clarity, and language support central design constraints from the start — not secondary concerns.
Purno — retail chain management platform overview
Research
The project started with discovery, not interface production.
The founder started with an incomplete scope and a handful of screenshots. Interviews revealed the constraints. Competitive analysis shaped feature prioritisation — products like Square, Loyverse, Toast, Clover, Lightspeed, and bKash were benchmarked to understand which patterns were familiar, which had strong market fit, and where complexity would create friction for Bangladeshi users.
Competitive analysis
Information architecture
Key Decisions
Three decisions shaped how the product became usable for its actual users.
The product direction was built from the bottom up — information architecture was designed to evolve around real user needs, not assumptions from global retail products.
Flatter category structure over nested hierarchy
- —Nested categories — standard in global retail products — proved too complex for the target users in this context
- —A flatter model matched local mental models and reduced interaction overhead during browsing
- —The change came directly from watching users struggle to locate items through multi-level menus
Color-coded categories for visual scanning
- —Users browsing without explicit search needed a way to orient quickly within a dense product list
- —Color coding reduced the cognitive load of scanning and improved transaction time by ~20% in that scenario
- —A simple visual signal outperformed a structural change here
Localized UX decisions from the start
- —Low technical confidence among target users made ease of use, transaction speed, and language support central constraints — not afterthoughts
- —Onboarding language, navigation patterns, and interaction density were all calibrated to the local context
- —Competitive benchmarks (Square, Loyverse, bKash) shaped feature prioritisation, not direct feature copying
Category redesign — flatter structure replacing nested hierarchy, with color coding for visual scanning
Outcomes
The design work moved the product from founder vision to fundable MVP.
VC-backed momentum
The design work supported MVP validation and helped the product move into funding conversations
20% faster
Category redesign improved item discovery when users were browsing rather than searching
Localized UX
Design choices calibrated to local user expectations — onboarding language, flatter navigation, and interaction density
Cross-platform coherence
Retail and merchant surfaces stayed consistent across desktop, tablet, and mobile without dedicated POS hardware