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Inventory is everything: Designing the look, feel, and flow of a new category-defining app.

Client

Lekhha

Industry

Retail Management

Duration

3 months

Year

2022

Scope of Work

Brand Identity
Digital Design
Top portion of a black smartphone with a notch and camera on a blue screen background.

Lekhha: A smarter way to handle accounts & logistics

Lekhha is an app made for households and small businesses to manage their inventory, with functionalities for purchasing from local vendors and selling unused inventory built in. 

That’s a lot of features for one single app, and the visual design and UI for the app as a whole and all user journeys needed to be seamless. Enter Parentheses.

Lekhha's primary objective was to make accounting and inventory management simple for households and small businesses.

Smiling woman shopping for fresh produce with a child at a market stall filled with lemons, limes, and potatoes.
Smiling man with folded arms standing in front of a wall display of leather bags and satchels.

Its secondary objective was to serve vendors and help in their logistics - be it purchasing from other vendors, managing users, selling extra inventory and the other myriad challenges that they face.

This single app was packed with features and needed clean UI, well organised information, and better functionality than competing apps. We ensured that Lekhha got them all.

Smartphone displaying Lekhha app's current inventory screen with food items and expiration details, promoting transaction and resource tracking.

Brand Identity

Mobile app sidebar menu showing user profile, account info, and navigation options like Home, Inventory, Giveaway, Shopping Cart, Orders, Reports, and Help.

UI/UX Design

Mobile screen showing Lekhha app with a woman holding cash beside a large smartphone and text about Lekhha helping everyday.

Website Design

Papers Please:
Journey of the logo

We set off on creating the logo and realised that what was ubiquitous and unavoidable with inventory management was paperwork. So.Much.Paperwork. We wanted the logo to evoke images of checklists or paperclips or graphs or boxes because nothing screams inventory management and accounting like these motifs.

After multiple explorations, we simplified the logo into a logo that turned the L of Lekhha into a ribbon-like unit that resembled a bent receipt. The logo then extended itself into a flexible design language with this motif at its core.

Icon with a blue rounded square background featuring two yellow geometric shapes resembling stylized leaves or wings, shown both enlarged on a yellow background and as an app icon on a smartphone screen's dock.
Spiral-bound notebook with dark cover featuring yellow and brown geometric design and text reading 'lekhha' and 'Rakho smart hisab.'Blue business card for Ramesh Naik, Marketing Head, with yellow ribbon design and contact email and phone number on light wooden surface.
Yellow flyer promoting Lekhha app with features like finding nearby vendors, generating expenditure sheets, lending unused items, simplifying purchase decisions, and tracking expirations, plus three steps to get started: create account, verify identity, and start tracking.
With all its diverse use-cases, Lekhha was intended to help its users manage their day-to-day with ease, prioritising working smart over working hard when it came to logistics. Hence the tagline "rakho smart hisaab"!
Person holding smartphone showing a chat screen with a notification displaying a yellow checkmark and message 'Bid placed successfully!' for Extra Books from Deepak.
Billboard advertising Lekhha, a resource management app, with a smartphone displaying the Lekhha logo and app store icons for download.
Blue book cover with yellow abstract shapes and the logo and text 'lekhha' at the top right corner.Curled white A4 paper with a yellow and black 'lekhha' logo on a dark blue background.
Two promotional flyers for Lekhha app, highlighting smart expense tracking, inventory management, digital records, and household finance simplification, with app store download buttons.

The Lekhha Ribbon

Lekhha's design uses a long twirled paper strip (derived from the logo) as a graphic element. We called it the Lekhha Ribbon, and used it across touchpoints to create a seamless design identity.
Billboard showing two people looking at a tablet with the text: Compare. Buy. Jamaai. promoting Lekhha app for resource management with App Store and Google Play icons.
Newspaper ad for Lekkha app showing a woman interacting with a large smartphone displaying a handbag icon, encouraging stores to join the digital map.
Woman smiling and holding fabric in a store with shelves of folded textiles, alongside text promoting organization, best prices, and new platform customers.
Young woman sitting on a striped sofa looking at her smartphone with a slight smile, next to text promoting Lekhha app for digitising workplaces and analysing expenses.

Interactions for inventory

Lekhha was divided into three segments; Resource Management, Consumer Connect, and Vendor Connect. 



All these needed to be represented seamlessly and intuitively without any clutter. That's no mean feat!
User flows were documented and shared with the stakeholders, and after lots of back-and-forth, we had about 3–4 iterations of flows for each module. These were then converted into key screens using the design system created earlier, and tested with prototypes.
Mobile shopping cart interface showing items sugar, onions, and rice with quantities, prices, and options to edit or delete.Mobile app screen showing current inventory with details for Sugar including stock quantity 1kg, expiry date 29/04/2022, price per unit 60, and storage location on bottom shelf, plus options to mark as borrowed, shared, or giveaway.Mobile app screen for updating open orders showing vendor name, order ID, purchase date, product details like sugar with quantity 50, price, and status with update button.Mobile chat interface showing a conversation about a book sale negotiation, with messages discussing final offer, agreement, and thank you.
Smartphone displaying a Total Valuation Report screen placed on an open spiral notebook with a white and blue pen, next to a laptop keyboard.
Then we filled in the gaps. We refined these screens, created the smaller screens in between the key ones, and finally created the desktop web app screens, keeping everything consistent across platforms.
Tablet screen showing inventory management interface with product list including sugar, onions, rice, brown sugar, and sugar syrup, with bulk import option and highlighted selected rows.
Hand holding smartphone displaying Lekhha app with text 'Start tracking your home, shop, expenses and resources' on an orange background.Person holding a smartphone showing a bid details screen and a cup of black coffee with a spoon in the other hand.

A platform for the platform: A website to explain it all

Lekhha's key motifs of the paper and ribbon were complemented with a library of illustrations to illustrate its various use cases and benefits. We took simple existing illustrations from storyset and modified them to fit Lekhha's visual language, and to convey the nuances so unique to Indian households and vendors.
Animated illustration showing a sequence of green briefcase icons moving upwards through a series of circular checkpoints, symbolizing a process or onboarding workflow.Animated illustration of a woman holding a large checklist with boxes checked, surrounded by icons of a shield, funnel, and settings gear representing onboarding and task completion.Animation showing user interface onboarding steps cycling between profile setup, organization details, and billing information on a laptop screen.
Person holding a white cup of tea and using a laptop displaying a webpage about simplifying household finances.

Smart hisaab success!

At the end of this project, we had a simple and relatable design identity and UI, and a product that was set to change the daily lives of Indian households and vendors.

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