Indu Tomar's Portfolio

Point of Sale Application (POS)

Revamp of a legacy POS Application

HandT Pawnbrokers is the leading pawnbroker in the UK and has been offering financial & retail services since 1897. With 280+ stores across the UK

To enhance efficiency and meet modern business needs, HandT Pawnbrokers decided to revamp their outdated Point of Sale (POS) system, which had been in use for over 15 years. The goal is to design an intuitive, efficient, and secure web application to manage daily tasks such as creating pawn loans, valuations, layaway, travel money transactions, cheque cashing, retail sales, inventory management, and daily reporting.

Objectives of the Revamp

Reduce the time for creating valuations and pawn loans to save time and effort
Simplify customer registration and KYC verification.
Enable multiple services within a single transaction.
Ensure a fully digital and hassle-free agreement process.
Automate alerts for Suspicious Activity & Reporting (SAR).
Easy access to frequently used features like the paydown and layaway payment calculators.

My Role

Product Designer

Responsibilities

Design research, Concept development, Design strategy, Wireframe, UI design, Interaction design

Year

2023

Design Process

I follow the UX Design Process Empathize, Define, Ideate and UI design to transfer complex business need to simple clean user flows.

Business requirement

Talk to the stakeholders and understand the business requirements and transfer complex business needs to simple clean user flows.

Understand users

Conduct user interviews and user research to understand what the users need and users pain points

Create user flows

Break down complex user flows into simpler ones and conduct usability testing.

User Research

I carried out user research and interviews to identify user goals and challenges throughout their workflow. During these interviews, I focused on their daily activities, service delivery processes, and interactions with customers.

We conducted a number of interviews
Sketched multiple end-to-end journeys based on various users to capture a comprehensive view.
Identified all touchpoints users have with the applications.
Monitored user interactions with the service.
Captured patterns in user behavior both while using the service and after its use.
Mapped touchpoints against the user’s journey to determine positive or negative experiences.

Personas

Based on the interviews/workshop we set up a persona, for each user involved. We referred to them throughout the entire product development process.

Create detailed personas for each user type (e.g., Store User, Area Manager, SME) based on the gathered data.
Determine how each persona would handle specific processes such as registering a new customer, creating a new pledge valuation, renewing loans, performing till checks, and creating transfers.
Share the personas with the development team to guide the application design.
Conduct additional interviews with users to validate and ensure consistency with test findings.
Use feedback from user testing and interviews to refine and update personas, ensuring they remain relevant and accurate throughout the product development process.

User flow

Here’s an example illustrating the user flow for how a store user raises a valuation request and receives the notification.

Concept Development

We started with whiteboard discussions, then we created Paper wireframes to identify all the elements we need and we also created Low-fidelity prototype to help us to quickly test and validate the design concepts. Based on the feedback, I would update the wireframes, prototypes and user-flows accordingly, yet ensuring that the wider team (Developers, Product Owners, Business Analysts and Architects) would be aware of the design changes.

POS Design System

Since there was no design system in place, I decided to develop one to bring consistency, efficiency, and scalability to our design and development process. With our new component library, we can now build new features and screens in days—something that previously required a lot of effort to explain and align within the team. Here’s how it has transformed our workflow:

Consistency Across the App – Every screen and feature now follows a uniform look and feel, preventing inconsistent UI elements.
Faster Development & Better Collaboration – Designers and developers use predefined styles and components, speeding up the process and reducing communication gaps.
Scalability Without Compromising Quality – As the application grow, we can maintain the same high standard of design without extra effort.
Improved Accessibility – The system ensures that our application is usable by all users, regardless of their abilities.

Mockups

Here are some screens illustrating the item valuation and notification journey.

Outcome

The application has become a pivotal tool for Store Users, streamlining their daily tasks and customer service, which previously required multiple tools. It is now live in 270 stores across the UK.

40% reduction in the time needed to create a new pawn loan request.
83% of customers with an active loan have successfully completed KYC.
74% of users appreciate the basket feature for managing multiple services in a single transaction.
73% of users praised the new application for its simplicity and ease of use.