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Compliance-First POS Platform for California Recycling Centers
End-to-end product design for a recycling center management platform — from a 6-stage ticketing wizard and CRV pricing engine to cash drawer compliance, audit trails, and CalRecycle reporting.
What needed solving
California recycling centers operate under strict CRV regulations — daily weight limits, certified scales, mandatory CalRecycle reporting, and 5-year audit trails — yet most still run on legacy POS systems or spreadsheets that can't enforce compliance at the transaction level. The client needed a modern platform that makes compliance automatic, not optional — handling walk-in ticketing, bag-and-drop workflows, CRV + scrap pricing, cash drawer controls, and fraud prevention in a single system that operators can trust and regulators can verify.
Rules I worked within
Regulatory-first design — every workflow must enforce California CRV rules (daily limits, material eligibility, DORIIS reporting) at the UI level, not as an afterthought.
10 interconnected modules — dashboard, ticketing, customers, cash drawers, containers, pricing, loyalty, incentives, audit, and reporting — all sharing data and enforcing consistent compliance rules.
Dual workflow support — walk-in customers (immediate processing) and bag-and-drop customers (deferred processing with notification) require different UX flows but identical pricing and compliance logic.
Cash drawer is a compliance system — operators cannot select denominations, transactions are immutable, and no ticketing can start without an opened drawer. UX must make these constraints feel natural, not restrictive.
Measurable outcomes
Designed a comprehensive component library — base primitives, application components, and page-specific modules — powering 10 core features across tablet and desktop.
Designed the core transaction engine — a 6-stage wizard from customer check-in through inspection, weighing, CRV calculation, processing, and payout — with fraud checks at every gate.
Delivered end-to-end product design across dashboard, ticketing, customers, cash drawers, containers, pricing, loyalty, incentives, audit, and compliance reporting.
Created comprehensive engineer handoff documentation — 230+ component inventory, layout patterns, design tokens, process flows, and compliance rules — enabling seamless dev execution.
“In regulated industries, compliance can't be a feature you bolt on — it must be the foundation the entire product is built on. This project proves that when you design compliance into every interaction, operators stop fighting the system and start trusting it.”