← Frederik Smal

Case study · 2016–2019

Shopbox A busy counter. One calm system.

An iPad point of sale and a web back-office had grown apart. I made them one product, then moved upstream to own the backlog, roadmap and delivery for a distributed team.

  1. RoleUX/UI Designer, then Lead Product Manager
  2. TeamA distributed development team
  3. WithDevelopers, sales and the CTO
  4. Scale100+ merchants in 3 countries
The Shopbox point of sale on an iPad: products, the open table and Pay.
The product screen with its grid and spacing marked.The onboarding flow: every path from opening the app to the counter screen.The web back-office: revenue by day, compared by staff member.Rooms and tables, for cafés and restaurants.

In our customer survey, 3 in 4 merchants found the app easy to use and satisfying.

The problem

The visual mess was only a symptom.

Staff need speed in the middle of service. Owners and finance need to manage dense data. The product had grown unevenly, and the logic underneath had grown apart along with the screens.

One language

Fewer ways of doing the same thing.

I adopted Material Design across both interfaces and built reusable patterns, so staff and developers learned one way of doing each thing. Common behaviour stopped being rebuilt for every feature.

DecisionConsistency is worth it when it removes decisions.

Moving upstream

From interface problems to product problems.

My work moved to feature opportunities, prioritisation, specifications, client requirements and long-term direction, with a team spread across countries. That became my master’s research on distributed software development at the IT University of Copenhagen.

LearnedA design system cannot fix unclear product logic.