TL;DR

PROBLEM

PC brands display their products at exclusive as well as multi-brand stores. A brand pays a store to display a guaranteed number of its units on the floor, in exchange for a fixed payout per unit displayed.

Exclusive

Exclusive

Multibrand

The arrangement only works if both sides trust the number. In practice, neither side had real visibility, stores self-reported, and brands had no independent way to verify.

This created frictions in a relationship operating at national scale: thousands of devices, hundreds of stores, dozens of brands, real money changing hands on a number nobody could confirm. And at times it reached points where either the brand was threatening to pull the subsidies or incase of a multi-brand store the stores gave better services to the competitors.

SOLUTION

The existing tool was an LMS (Lead Management System) used by store staff to log customer interest. Getting device-level tracking meant installing a lightweight background service on every demo unit, store staff would need to install it manually, at thousands-of-devices scale.

This came to us as an operational ask, not a design brief: "we need a way to track which devices are actually on the demo/showcase." The interesting work was in what we did with that ask next.

PROBLEM BEGETS OPPORTUNITY

I made the case to reframe the project, instead of shipping a tracking utility, we'd ship an idle-screen advertising platform, with the tracking service as the data layer underneath it.

The PM was worried about the scope creep and about getting the buy in from the client, and the developers pushed back on building more than "just tracking" in a month. I put together a rough concept and framed it as a question: if we're installing software on 3,500 machines anyway, what's the cost of doing slightly more on each one and what's the upside if it works? The PM came around when the math held up. The engineers agreed once we scoped V1 tightly enough that it wasn't a significant overrun.

We brainstormed and debated about how to take advantage of this opportunity - Videos, advertisements, offers, technical specs, CSAT survey etc. and we had to think of the best possible way to show it, and we settled on a Bento grid layout.

WHY BENTO GRID?

Clarity and Fast Comprehension

By compartmentalizing, important details are easily distinguishable and not lost in a text-heavy list.

Engagement and Retention

By mixing visuals with concise text, it becomes memorable than a typical spec sheet.

Visual Hierarchy and Storytelling

Strategic placement of different blocks helps convey the story better.

In idle state, the grid reads as a poster and visual hierarchy does the work, no interaction needed. In active state, an associate can jump straight to whichever cell matters for this customer, price-sensitive buyer to the offers cell, spec-curious buyer to the performance cell, instead of scrolling a linear page.

A grid lets different cells carry different weight for different moments, a single-column layout can't do that.

Although our team was aligned internally, We still had to convince our primary stakeholder (client) and I had to create concepts to bring them on board.

HAUNTING QUESTIONS

While creating concepts certain questions started haunting me

How do I balance between tech-savvy users and casual buyers who just want to know if it's "good enough"?

What would be a sweet spot regarding the amount of information to be shown?

How do I balance the information in each cards? What would be an ideal balance between images and text?

How do I maintain consistency when some laptops have standout features worth highlighting and others don't?

Do users want to see all specifications upfront or discover them progressively?

How do I reflect the brand and sub-brand values in the design?

Do I include videos, offers and promotions?

Answers Found and unfound

How do I balance between tech-savvy users and casual buyers who just want to know if it's "good enough"?

Progressive disclosure: headline spec visible at a glance, deeper specs one tap away

What would be a sweet spot regarding the amount of information to be shown?

Features and product video given top priority slots; specs and offers secondary

How do I balance the information in each cards? What would be an ideal balance between images and text?

Decided case-by-case based on whether the laptop had a standout feature to hero

How do I maintain consistency when some laptops have standout features worth highlighting and others don't?

Not fully resolved, we made fallback screens to bridge the gap temporarily

Do users want to see all specifications upfront or discover them progressively?

Resolved toward progressive disclosure, headline specs readable at a glance, full spec sheet one tap away.

How do I reflect the brand and sub-brand values in the design?

Resolved via theming, but only two states shipped, not the full intended range

Do I include videos, offers and promotions?

Yes, I drafted a content specification document for brand teams defining asset dimensions, video length limits, and fallback states for when assets weren't available. This was a necessary handoff given the CMS wasn't shipping in V1.

Compromises and Constraints

Our primary stakeholders were enthusiastic about the vision we sold but was not aligned on the timeline and wanted the concept developed within a strict one month time line as they wanted it to be part of their ongoing marketing campaign drive to boost offline sales. This was not enough time to validate a bespoke experience per brand or sub-brand, we had planned a system with a complete CMS powering it. So we had to scale down our ambitious plan and play it simple.

In hindsight, the bigger risk wasn't the one-month timeline. It was shipping without instrumenting the screens. We had no way to tell after launch which cells were getting attention, which products were converting, or whether the grid hierarchy we chose was right. If I were doing this again, I'd push for even basic engagement tracking (tap counts per cell, session length) to be scoped into V1, not deferred.

FINAL DESIGN

The RMN experience was launched across India

and is currently Live in stores.

What we don't yet have: engagement data at the cell level, or any signal from the brand side on whether the screens changed purchase conversations on the floor. That instrumentation is the first thing this product needs before V2 planning.