Quick Summary

🚩 PROBLEM:

Selling old phones in retail stores was slow, inconsistent, and often met with mistrust. Retailers relied on informal WhatsApp groups/sheets for price checks, leading to delays, disputes, and poor customer experience

👤 MY ROLE

Sole UX Designer, I led the end-to-end redesign of the buyback journey, from research to prototyping, testing, and final design.

💡 SOLUTION

Introduced a two-step diagnostic flow with upfront price visibility and fool-proof video verification. Replaced long, error-prone forms with quick checks tailored for retailers.

🚀 IMPACT

⏱ Diagnostic time cut from 12–15 mins to approx 5 mins
🎯 Genuine conversions improved as only serious sellers continued the full flow
⚖️ Partner disputes dropped (approx 42% in pilot stores) due to fool-proof video verification.

Problem Statement

Selling an old phone in-store has always been clunky. In field visits, I watched retailers juggle half-broken spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and gut feel just to quote a price. The result? Every store gave a different number, turnaround times dragged, and customers often walked away unconvinced they were getting a fair deal.

Challenge: Create a foolproof, retailer-first buyback tool that delivers fast, trusted quotes customers accept and liquidation partners can rely on.

MY ROLE

• Partnered with product and retail ops to understand how store agents quoted prices.

• Conducted field research in metro and Tier-2 cities to observe live conversations.

• Designed, prototyped, and tested the diagnostic flows directly with retail agents.

• Delivered mobile-first, light-weight designs optimized for patchy networks and entry-level devices. This was not about polishing a consumer-facing app. It was about enabling retailers, OneAssist’s partners - with a tool they could trust and adopt without hesitation.

Getting Bored?

Let’s move to ux initiatives and some screens. Why not? they are based on 12 field research

1. Splitting Diagnostic Flow into 2 steps: Soft check → detailed one

Research Insight

Retailers often spent 12 -15 minutes filling long forms and uploading device photos before the final price was shown. If the valuation was lower than expected, customers simply walked away. Both sides felt their time had been wasted. Over time, this led to frequent drop-offs and discouraged retailers from using the dashboard. Customers who were genuinely interested in selling - wanted to see price earlier

“I spend 12- 15 minutes filling all details, and then the customer rejects the price. Total waste of time.” Quote from retailer (Laxmi Nagar, Delhi)

UX Solution

To solve this, I introduced a two-step diagnostic process that gave both retailers and customers an early signal without committing them to the full workflow:
Soft Check (2-3 mins): A lightweight step with only 4–5 high-depreciation single click questions. Soft check generated a quick price range, letting uninterested users drop off and keeping only serious sellers in the flow
Full Check (4-6 mins): Only genuinely interested users continued with detailed diagnostics, ensuring accurate valuation while saving retailers’ time.

💡 Average diagnostic time dropped from 12-15 mins to approx 4-6 mins. Retailers reported reduced frustration, and adoption increased as only serious sellers stayed in the flow.

2. 360° Video Verification - Beyond Static Photos

Research Insight

In the old flow, retailers captured static photos of devices. Many of these photos were angled, cropped, or incomplete, which made it easy to hide scratches or damage. Liquidation partners often flagged mismatches between the submitted photos and the actual device condition. This created delays, disputes, and mistrust in the process, frustrating both partners and retailers.

UX Solution

To solve this, I introduced a guided 360° video capture flow. Retailers were prompted to slowly rotate the device while the system gave step-by-step cues and flagged missed angles. This ensured every part of the phone was documented in one continuous recording, creating a fool-proof verification trail. The new approach reduced fraud, gave liquidation partners more confidence in valuations, and minimized disputes in settlements.

💡 Disputes with liquidation partners dropped significantly(approx42% in pilot stores), improving trust and speeding up settlements.

3. Negotiation Margins

Research Insight

During field visits, retailers explained they often felt constrained by fixed pricing. When upselling new devices, they wanted flexibility to adjust the trade-in offer slightly to close deals. Without this, some agents bypassed the tool altogether and negotiated manually.

UX Solution

Based on these findings, a configurable margin buffer was introduced into the pricing logic, providing retailers with limited flexibility while maintaining backend consistency. I designed the flow to display payouts, margins, and tax adjustments in a clear and simplified breakdown, ensuring transparency for agents with varying levels of technical literacy.

👉 Explore the redesigned flow step by step... View Prototype

Outcomes & Impact

⏱ Diagnostic time cut from 12–15 mins → ~5 mins.
🤝 Partner disputes dropped by ~40% with 360° verification.
📈 Retailer adoption grew as the tool replaced WhatsApp/spreadsheets.
🙌 Customers experienced faster, clearer, more trustworthy pricing.

Key Learnings

• Trust = clarity, not inflated price. Both retailers and customers valued knowing why a price was set, rather than being offered an unrealistically high quote.

• Retailers ≠ technicians. One-tap inputs, guided flows, and lightweight UI design outperformed heavy forms, unnecessary visuals and checklists.

• Field research drives business value. Insights surfaced directly from store visits shaped critical product decisions, including negotiation flexibility.

Next Opportunities

• Explore AI-driven auto-damage detection from video to speed up verification further.

• Build analytics dashboards for retailers to track buyback volumes, upsell conversions, and performance trends. Currently they can see pending completed requests only

👋 Thank you for reading - happy to share more during a conversation

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👉 Valuation was only half the journey.

In Part 2, I’ll walk through how we solved the bigger challenge: Settlements.. Read part 2 ↗️