AguMagu — Price Monitoring System

AguMagu is a live government product built for the Ministry of Economic Development, Maldives — hosted under MaldivesTrade.gov.mv. Its purpose: to monitor and publish the real-time prices of essential goods across the country, ensuring that staple products — fruits, vegetables, fish, and other essentials — stay within reach for every citizen.

The product has three distinct surfaces, each serving a completely different user in a completely different context.

The public portal is where any citizen can see the current monitored prices for the government's essential goods list. No login, no friction — just a live, filterable list of commodity prices updated as field agents submit new data.

The admin dashboard is the operational command centre. Government administrators manage the full system from here: the products being monitored, the outlets being surveyed, the users and their permission levels, and the entries coming in from the field. Supervisors review incoming entries before they're published, and trend data and threshold alerts surface pricing anomalies before they become policy problems.

The data entry module is a mobile-first web app used by field agents on the ground. They log into assigned outlets — stores and markets — and record the current price and availability of each monitored item. The submitted entries flow through a supervisor approval layer before they're published to the public portal.

Encrea Studio designed and delivered all three surfaces. As Lead Designer, I owned the full product design: information architecture, interaction flows, visual system, and component library across every surface.

The central design challenge was that each surface has a completely different user, a completely different context, and completely different stakes — but they all need to feel like one coherent product.

Three user types, three contexts. A citizen visiting the public portal on a phone needs to find a price in seconds — no registration, no learning curve, in either English or Dhivehi. A government administrator reviewing entries in an office needs a data-dense dashboard that surfaces anomalies without overwhelming them. A field agent logging prices inside a store needs a mobile form that's fast, forgiving, and works with one hand. Designing for all three simultaneously, without letting the complexity of any one surface contaminate the others, required discipline across every decision.

Government-grade data accuracy. The public portal publishes price information that citizens and policymakers rely on. A wrongly entered price or an unchecked outlier has real-world consequences. The approval workflow — where every submitted entry lands first in the Approvals tab for supervisor review before it's published — exists entirely because of this constraint. The 24-hour auto-publish window adds a safety buffer. Threshold alerts on the dashboard flag items whose prices have moved beyond acceptable ranges. Every layer of the system is a safeguard.

Data entry in the field. Field agents are in stores, often moving quickly, logging prices for a long list of products. The data entry UX had to be fast above everything else — minimum taps, clear availability toggles, a built-in numeric keypad, and a review-before-submit step that catches errors without creating friction. The "My Entry Log" feature lets agents see their own submission history, which builds accountability without requiring supervisor oversight for every action.

Bilingual layout. The public portal was designed in both English and Dhivehi — the Maldivian national language, which reads right-to-left. This required full layout mirroring for the Dhivehi version, not just text translation.

The architecture came first. Three surfaces, one system — so the component library and design language had to be defined once and applied consistently. The admin dashboard and data entry module share the green accent that identifies the operational side of the product. The public portal uses teal, visually distinguishing the citizen-facing surface from the government-internal tools without breaking the family resemblance.

Public portal — Built for the widest possible audience, the portal is a clean, fast-loading list. Category filters at the top (All, Essentials, Fruits & Vegetables, Fish, etc.) let users narrow to what they need. Each item shows its current monitored price clearly. The Dhivehi version mirrors the layout completely, with RTL-appropriate type and spacing. No login, no account, no barriers.

Admin dashboard — The dashboard opens on a price trend chart — a macro view of how commodity prices are moving over time, filterable by date range, category, and item. Below it: a summary table of all monitored items with current price, previous price, quantity, and a red/green threshold indicator. The Latest Entries panel sits alongside it, showing real-time field submissions with outlet, timestamp, and status. The left sidebar covers the full operational scope: Dashboard, Items, Users, Outlets, Entries, Approvals, Reports, and General Settings.

The Items module handles the product catalogue — what's being monitored, at what units, in which categories. Admins can create, edit, archive, and restore items. The Outlets module handles the physical locations: stores and markets each have their own creation flow, since their attributes differ. The Users module is where admins create accounts, assign permission groups, and activate or deactivate access. The Approvals tab is the quality gate — all incoming field entries land here first. Supervisors review and approve, and only then do entries move to the published Entries tab and flow to the public portal.

Data entry module — Mobile-first, accessed via a separate link from the admin system. The login flow handles two cases: new users (who must set their password on first login, across a three-step onboarding) and existing users (a faster two-step flow). The home screen presents three clear paths: a new essentials entry, a new fruits and vegetables entry, or a new market entry. Below them: a link to the agent's own entry log.

The entry form itself is structured around items, not free fields. Each product in the monitored list appears in sequence — the agent marks it as available or not, enters the current price and quantity, and moves to the next. A built-in numeric keypad keeps the interaction on-screen. At the end of the list, a review screen shows the full submission before it's sent. A "Submission Successful" confirmation closes the loop. The entry log gives each agent a running record of everything they've submitted.