UI/UX Design · Team Lead · Customer · Technician · Operations
Shipping for an at-home electronic repair service.
TechGuy is a B2C electronics repair startup. Everything from customer bookings to engineer job management ran on WhatsApp. We researched, designed, and shipped three connected interfaces from scratch.
Book a repair online, a certified technician arrives at your door. I joined as Founding Product Designer and led a 4-person team to replace a WhatsApp-based system with three purpose-built interfaces: customer, technician, and operations. Shipped from scratch in six months.
01 Problem
Three reasons WhatsApp was not working.
We were brought in to design an interface. The CEO already knew WhatsApp was not scaling. What we needed to understand was exactly where it was breaking and why.
Three user types. One group chat. Customers, technicians, and operations all communicating through the same WhatsApp threads. No separation of context, no structure, no way to scale.
Personal and professional chats mixed
Technicians managed 20+ customer conversations in the same app as personal messages. A client update could get buried in seconds. No separation, no way to prioritise.
Unsaved contacts, impossible to find anyone
Finding a specific customer meant scrolling through partially-remembered names. Operations kept a contact list by hand that never stayed current.
No view of where any job stood
Tracking a single job required reading across three separate threads: customers, technicians, and vendors. One missed message could delay an entire repair.
The Goal
Simplify workflows. Build something no one needs a manual for.
Goal
Design purpose-built interfaces for customers, technicians, and operations that simplify day-to-day workflows and feel intuitive enough to use from day one, with no training required.
Simplify
Replace fragmented WhatsApp chaos with structured, role-specific workflows. Each user type sees only what they need, when they need it.
Intuitive
A customer on mobile tracking a repair, a technician in the field updating a job, an operations lead assigning tickets from a desk. All different contexts. All obvious to use.
02 User Research
10+ conversations. Three completely different stories.
We spoke with 10+ users across all three types, at least 3 per group. Rather than asking what people wanted, we asked them to complete real tasks on the existing WhatsApp-based system. That is where the real story started.
Secondary Research
Full service flow mapped before any screens were designed
What they said vs what we observed
Technician
What they said
"WhatsApp is easy. I don't think there's really a problem with how it works for us."
What we observed
4 minutes to find a specific chat and get job context
Mixed client and personal messages twice in one session
Audible frustration searching for unsaved contacts
The Turning Point
People adapt to broken systems without realising it.
Everyone said WhatsApp was fine. Until we sat with them. Watching an operations team member spend 4 minutes scrolling to find a single customer update changed everything. What interviews miss, observation reveals.
Key Findings
Customer
Handing over expensive electronics via WhatsApp felt informal and unverified
Needed visible credentials and real-time tracking to feel safe
Trust was the primary barrier to conversion, not price or speed
Technician
Context-switching between personal and work chats created measurable delays
Normalised friction; they didn't realise the time loss until we measured it
Needed a dedicated work space, not another WhatsApp conversation
Operations
Coordinating 3 separate threads with no overview was operationally brittle
Urgent and routine tickets were indistinguishable in WhatsApp
One missed message could delay an entire repair job
03 Iteration
We mapped the service before we touched a screen.
Before any wireframes, we collaborated with the software engineers, the CEO, and a handful of end users to map out the complete service flow: where each user type touched the system, what triggered each action, and where the handoffs between customers, technicians, and operations happened.
We ran low-fidelity testing sessions to validate the app flow structure before committing to high-fidelity screens. The goal was to catch structural gaps early, not after rounds of designed screens needed to be rebuilt.
Drag to pan · Scroll to zoom
04 Final Design
Three interfaces. One connected service.
Each product was designed for a specific user context. Not three separate tools, one service ecosystem where an action in one interface automatically flows to the next.
Customer · Mobile App
Repair tracking and trust-building from the first tap.
Live repair tracking
Customers see exactly where their job is at any point, without needing to message anyone.
Testimonials at booking
Social proof and credentials surface right when the customer decides to hand over their device.
Testimonials at the booking stage
Live repair status tracking
Technician · Mobile App
Everything they need. None of the noise.
Personal metrics dashboard
Active, completed, and pending tickets at a glance. The 4-minute WhatsApp scroll becomes a 3-second tap.
Live ticket updates
Real-time status changes and push notifications. No WhatsApp checking required.
In-app client communication
A dedicated chat per client, fully separated from personal messages.
Quick-access client info
Device details, repair address, job history, and progress all on one screen.
Personal metrics and live ticket feed
In-app client info and job details
Operations · Dashboard
One screen for everything that used to need fifteen tabs.
Unified view
All technicians, clients, and vendors visible from a single dashboard. No thread-scrolling.
Ticket assignment
Workload visible before assigning. See who's free and who's already at capacity.
Live status overview
Every job's status across the board, with urgent tickets clearly differentiated from routine ones.
Operations dashboard with unified ticket management and technician assignment
05 Impact
Shipped. Live. CEO-endorsed.
20%
Task completion uplift
30%
Faster design-to-dev cycles
3
Products shipped across all user types
"
"Rhea is an extremely hard-working and passionate designer. She involved herself immensely in her work and is also a very good listener which enables her to understand the required content in depth."
GM
Garv Mulchandani
CEO, TechGuy
06 What I'd do differently
What I'd build differently today.
This was 2021, and I have learned a lot since then. Looking back with four years of experience, two things stand out clearly.
📊
More visualisation in the operations dashboard. The operations role communicates with the highest number of people simultaneously: customers, technicians, and vendors. The dashboard handled this, but it was primarily list-based. Today I'd push for richer data visualisation, technician workload as a chart, vendor lead times over time, ticket volume by day. Operations needs to see patterns, not just lists. A list tells you what is happening. A chart tells you why it keeps happening.
🧠
AI-assisted planning for operations and technicians. For operations: smart ticket assignment based on each technician's current job locations, active ticket count, and how far existing repairs have progressed. For technicians: an AI-assisted daily schedule that clusters jobs by area, prioritises by urgency, and adapts as tickets update throughout the day. These are the natural next step for a service platform at this scale.