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Deciding to start fresh, we began by brainstorming ideas around ‘quick wins’, (or ‘tasters’ as we called them) – products which we could quickly bring to market that would also provide value to our customers.

From these tasters, a ‘spotcheck’ tool was chosen as a starting point. Users would enter their postcode and a product, and we would display results, allowing them to find the best price near them.
This simple tool gave us a starting point to begin testing and gaining feedback.

Meanwhile, two workshops were held to work out ‘What next?’ – what will the product be, what features will we include etc.

These sessions were hugely beneficial – great ideas came from members in all departments, and within the two sessions we had nutted out a plan.

Between each workshop, I wireframed up some of the ideas discussed, to consolidate ideas and facilitate the next round of discussion. During the following weeks I created multiple paper prototypes to quickly test and get feedback on user journeys, as well as getting input from the dev team regarding what was possible on the small timeframes we were working with.

We decided on three lists – ‘My list’, which would be the current shopping list, a ‘Checklist’, and a ‘List history’ which became ‘Listory’.

Initially we had planned to have multiple ‘My lists’, however, it became apparent that multiple lists could be confusing to manage for the user, and difficult to build and manage for the developers.

I proposed instead to use the ‘list history’, to help users manage their items, by building in intelligent sorting, so all items previously purchased could be sorted by ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’ and ‘rarely’ items.

Of course, users need to be able to find the items that they want to add to their list. The searchbar in the header allows users to search from any screen within the site, while catalogue links in the footer, and catalogue links on the homepage are also entry points to the search journey.

The most value for users is to be found in the product modal – it is there that they can see the supermarket comparisons and find cheaper options (with more great features to come!). To encourage users to access this modal, we have kept information on the search tiles minimal, to encourage users to tap for more information.

There are 40,000 products across many categories, supermarkets can categorise items differently, and users have different expectations again. Some users prefer to find items by browsing, and others prefer key-word searches. And then, how to return high-quality results across a range of different searches?

Researching search and filtering patterns across a range of sites in different of industries was important to ensure we built something that users would recognise. With further user-testing, this will be improved of course, to ensure users can quickly and easily find what they are looking for.

Yes, there’s one of these too.

The first version was launched in July 2017, and we’ve experienced consistent sign-ups since then.

Since the first release further functional improvements – such as improved search results and better price comparisons, and additions – such as the ability to send items online, and breadcrumbs in the product modal have been made, as well as other UI & UX improvements based on customer requests, findings made observing users, and ideas and improvements generated internally.