A wholesale buyer walks the warehouse and orders dozens of line items — each with a unit, a quantity and a variant. Typing that into a phone, one field at a time, is the slowest possible interface for the job. Speaking it is the fastest: the app’s entire premise is that the buyer talks the way they already talk to a sales rep, and the software does the transcription and matching work.

The pipeline is four steps, and the design problem is that the buyer must trust all four. My job on the frontend was to keep every stage visible and correctable: what was heard, what was matched, what quantity was inferred. Nothing is auto-submitted — the final step is always an editable order the buyer confirms.

A voice recorder that stutters destroys confidence in the whole product, so the capture UI runs its waveform and timer at 60fps, driven by native animation rather than React state. Around it sits the unglamorous work: microphone permission flows on both platforms, an upload queue that survives the app going to background, and retry logic for the weak signal you get inside a warehouse. A failed upload never loses a recording.

The order flow is multi-step by design — review the matched items, adjust quantities, pick delivery, confirm — with animated transitions that keep the buyer oriented about where they are and what is still ahead. Navigation is a drawer, so the catalog, the current order and past orders stay one gesture apart. Every screen holds up with a long product name and a missing image, because the real catalog has plenty of both.

React Native with Expo, delivering iOS, Android and web from a single codebase with the same design language on all three. Full DE/EN internationalisation, since the buyers and the sales organisation don’t share a language. Six months from empty repository to a working app in the client’s hands.