Koala Living: the system had everything, it just wasn’t organised around how people worked
The system had everything. It just wasn’t organised around how people worked.
The evidence
- separate areas one sale moved through
- 4–5
- recurring patterns: buried actions, fragmented workflows, inconsistent patterns
- 3
- principles: align to workflow, reduce cognitive load, preserve what works
- 3
The system had grown without evolving.
Koala Living is a multi-location furniture retailer. Its POS ran day-to-day operations across its stores: sales, customer management, payments and fulfilment. Features and modules piled up while the structure stayed the same.
Employees handled transactions dozens of times a day, and a simple one could take them across four or five areas of the platform. Creating an order, managing customer details, taking payment and checking previous orders were separate journeys within one task.
The problem wasn’t missing functionality. It was the distance between what employees wanted to do and how the system made them navigate.
- OrderCreated in one area.
- CustomerDetails managed in another.
- PaymentProcessed somewhere else.
- Order historyChecked in yet another section.
Understanding before improving.
Replacing the POS would have put daily operations at risk and forced employees to relearn it. So I mapped the platform end to end: navigation, transactional flows, module relationships, and the points where employees kept switching context.
- Sale
- Customer
- Payment
- Fulfilment
How do you make an established system better without disrupting what already works?
The redesign had to be surgical, not sweeping: align the structure to the workflow, reduce cognitive load at decision points, and keep the behaviours that already worked.
What was actually broken
The system was organised around how it was built, not how people worked.
Three interventions made the difference.
Surface what people use most
High-frequency actions moved closer to the point of use, without adding new features.
Connect what belongs together
Sale, customer, payment and fulfilment became stages of one transaction, not separate modules.
Make the system predictable
Editing, confirming and searching were standardised, so what people learned in one place carried to the next.
What I learned
Know what not to change.
Enterprise design is often less about knowing what to change than knowing what not to change.
Respect embedded behaviour.
Existing systems hold years of workarounds and operational knowledge. Good redesign respects that history.
Find the precise intervention.
Look for the points where a precise change can meaningfully improve the experience.
The skill is not simply making a system better. It’s knowing how much better it needs to be, and where to stop.