Kirana

I spent three mornings behind the counters of three shops in south Bengaluru, logging every order that came in. Sixty-one orders. Thirty-eight arrived as voice notes or phone calls, nineteen as text lists, four in person. Almost none of them named a brand. People asked for atta, not a specific five kilogram pack, and trusted the shopkeeper to pick. Any interface that forced a brand decision was adding work the relationship had already removed.

The home screen became a reorder screen. Your last order sits at the top as a single card with a repeat button, then your frequently bought items as a grid you can tap up and down in quantity without opening a product page. Full browse still exists, one tap away, but it is the second citizen. In testing, twelve of fifteen participants completed a repeat order without ever using search.

A settings toggle assumes people commit to one language, and my participants did not. Instead every product carries both the English and the Kannada name in the same card, weighted so neither one reads as the translation of the other. I also indexed common transliterated spellings, because someone typing kothmir should not get an empty state.

I tested on participants' own devices, which were mostly budget Android handsets three or four years old. That killed two ideas immediately: a photo-heavy grid that took nine seconds to paint, and a bottom sheet that lagged badly on scroll. The final direction uses text-led cards, images at a smaller fixed ratio, and a substitution flow that works entirely offline until you hit send.