Baho Zay

Role

UI Designer

Client

Manmar Zarla Distribution

Year

2025

Tools

Figma

Designed the membership and redemption experience for a live B2B wholesale marketplace, now past 10,000 retailer installs across Myanmar.

What's Baho Zay?

Baho Zay is a B2B wholesale marketplace built by Myanmar Zarla Distribution — an eighteen-year-old distribution company — to sell stock directly to the shops that resell it. Retailers browse food and drink packages, order in bulk, pay on delivery or on credit, and earn points as they go.

Zarla calls it a "Central Marketplace," built on a B2B and B2R — business to retailer — model, meant to give shops better space utilisation, inventory management, and financing. Those three words explain more of this project than any brief did.

Two designers worked on the loyalty side. My teammate took Reward and How to Earn. I took the Membership Program and Claim — the tier system a shop belongs to, and the redemption flows where points turn into something real.

The program existed. The understanding didn't.

The business handed over the mechanics fully formed. Four tiers, spend thresholds, point multipliers, point prices, redemption rules, daily limits. None of it was mine to invent.

What nobody had worked out was whether a shop owner could follow any of it.

The mechanics assumed a user who would sit down and study them. The real user runs a counter — ordering stock between customers, on a phone, in Burmese, with someone waiting to be served. They will never read a tier table. They arrive with two questions and no patience: how do I get points, and what can I do with them.

The distance between a program that was complete and a program that was legible — that was the entire job.

The program existed. The understanding didn't.

Scope and Direction

The mandate was fixed on one side and open on the other. The loyalty logic was already decided — tiers, thresholds, point prices, redemption rules all arrived as spec. What hadn't been decided was any of the experience around it. That part was mine.

Two features, end to end, across roughly fifty frames. The Membership Program covered the member card, the four-tier ladder and its benefits, a first-run orientation, tier history, and a points-aware checkout. Claim covered the redemption catalogue, claim history, the claim inventory and its receiving flow, delivery confirmation, and phone top-up with its full set of failure states. My teammate held Reward and How to Earn alongside this, so both halves had to read as one product — everything was built on the existing Baho Zay design system, with shared components rather than parallel ones.

The direction: treat the program as something to be understood at a glance, not learned. Every screen had to answer a shop owner's question before they finished asking it.

UI highlights

A look at how both features came together.

Outcome

Baho Zay is live on Google Play and the App Store, past 10,000 retailer installs and actively maintained. The membership and claim flows both shipped as designed, after several rounds of stakeholder review.

Reflection

The rules arrived complete, which made it tempting to treat the work as decoration. The real problem was somewhere else — a program can be fully specified and still be unreadable to the person meant to use it. I also learned to read a spec as a system rather than a screen list: a contradiction in how tier promotion was defined went unnoticed until late because I was checking screens against requirements instead of against each other. And stakeholder rounds, however sharp, answer a different question than a shop owner holding the phone would.

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