work / case study 06
Rekanan app a shop owner opens every morning
turning about 27,000 fertiliser kiosks across Indonesia into a connected point of sale, so a company that sells through partners it doesn't own can see what's happening on the ground
- role
- product design, UX research, mobile design
- industry
- agriculture & government
- platform
- mobile
- year
- 2021 – 2023
the brief
Between Pupuk Indonesia's factories and the farmer sits a layer the company could barely see: 27,136 independent kiosks across the archipelago. They recorded sales on paper, tracked farmers' credit in notebooks and reported stock by hand, if at all. Rekan is the product I helped design and ship to close that gap: one app in every kiosk owner's hands that records the sale and sends the signal home.
the real users
Our research surfaced a clear persona: kiosk owners aged 45 to 60, often with low digital literacy, sometimes in areas with weak or no signal. The usual playbook, ship a slick point of sale and users will adapt, was the wrong one. A half-adopted app produces worse data than paper, because it lies about coverage.
So the win wasn't a feature-rich app. It was an app a 55-year-old kiosk owner in a low-signal village would actually open every morning. I owned the experience and interface design end to end, and built the personas, Agus Sutarya and Udin Saputra, from surveys, interviews, field observation and focus groups with real kiosk operators.
four pillars
- point of sale: a sale logged in seconds, farmers' credit tracked, today's revenue on the home screen the way a shopkeeper glances at the till
- stock: real-time stock at the kiosk, so the network knows it's running low before a farmer is turned away
- farmer points: a rewards layer that let the company profile its buyers at retail for the first time
- ordering: kiosks order from distributors inside the app and pay by bank transfer or paylater
- 100,000+
- combined downloads
- 15,000+
- average daily active users
- 3–4M
- transaction notes a month into the data lake
- 2
- awards: IDC Future Enterprise 2022 and a Gold Stevie 2023
ai in the loop
Rekan was designed before agents were part of my work. The machine here is the data pipeline; everything a person touches was designed around two kiosk owners.
- kiosk app
- transactions
- data lake
- analytics
| step | the machine | the design |
|---|---|---|
| every sale | 3–4 million notes a month flow into the company's data lake | made recording a sale take seconds, so the data exists at all |
| analytics | market share, pricing, demand prediction and churn from retail data | the farmer points layer, so buyers could be profiled instead of guessed at |
| stock | detects low stock at the kiosk in real time | large tap targets, plain language and today's revenue first |
| people | — | two personas from surveys, interviews, field observation and focus groups |
the proof
Beyond the numbers, Rekan passed an ISO 27001 audit in which the auditor marked its process area as exceeding expectations and a model for other applications in the holding. It was registered for copyright with Indonesia's Ministry of Law and Human Rights, and it was the holding's first cloud-based auto-scaling microservice architecture.
the journey
We didn't get there in one leap. Two years of iteration: surveying kiosk owners, watching them stumble on a screen, rebuilding it, shipping again. Designing for them meant resisting the urge to make the app impressive and committing to make it kind.
That foundation made the next chapter possible. When the government asked for the whole subsidised-fertiliser flow to go digital, Rekan became iPubers, and its components became Rekanesia.