Grocery Cart UI

Designing a tablet-based shopping assistant to reduce friction and decision fatigue in grocery stores

ROLE

UX Designer & Research Lead

TIMELINE

7 weeks (2021)

TOOLS

Figma, Miro, Lean UX, usability testing

Overview

Grocery Cart UI was a tablet-based application designed to live directly on grocery carts, helping shoppers navigate stores, manage shopping lists, compare products, and check out more efficiently.

The goal was to reduce the stress, time, and cognitive load associated with in-store grocery shopping while supporting different shopping styles, budgets, and dietary needs.

The Problem

In-store grocery shopping is often:

Disorganized and time-consuming
Difficult for users on budgets or tight schedules
Overwhelming for users with dietary restrictions or memory limitations
Lacking digital support once inside the store

Shoppers must juggle lists, prices, product locations, and constraints with little assistance.

The Solution

Grocery Cart UI proposed a cart-mounted tablet experience that:

Provides organized, interactive shopping lists
Supports product search, comparison, and filtering
Tracks spending in real time
Helps users navigate the store
Adapts to different user needs through profiles and saved data

The system was designed to function as a flexible companion rather than a rigid shopping flow.

Results & Impact

Identified high-value features such as comparison tools and dietary filters

Demonstrated how in-store technology could reduce friction

Created a cohesive end-to-end shopping experience

Validated key workflows through usability testing

Contraints & Consideration

Short 7-week academic timeline
Limited access to real grocery shoppers
Testing conducted in simulated contexts
Complex feature set needed to be scoped carefully

These constraints required rapid iteration and prioritization.

Research & Discovery

I led research efforts including:

User interviews to understand shopping pain points
Usability testing on early wireframes and prototypes
Affinity mapping to identify behavioral patterns
Exploration of how users budget, search, and make decisions

Research revealed strong needs around organization, speed, and reducing cognitive load.

Key Insights

Shoppers want to spend less time searching and more time deciding
Budget awareness reduces anxiety during shopping
Different users require different levels of guidance
Dietary needs and memory challenges significantly impact shopping behavior
In-store digital tools should support—not interrupt—the physical experience

Design & Exploration

Design work focused on:

Structuring shopping lists as the core experience
Designing comparison and filtering tools
Supporting both fast and exploratory shopping styles
Creating flows for account creation, checkout, and saving lists
Prototyping interactions that worked on large, mounted screens

Low- and high-fidelity prototypes were iterated based on testing.

Development Collaboration

This was a design-only academic project, but workflows and components were designed with technical feasibility in mind and aligned across the team through shared prototypes.

Validation & Exploration

Validation included:

Two rounds of usability testing across both sprints
Think-aloud task completion
Pattern analysis via affinity mapping
Iteration based on observed confusion and friction

This helped improve navigation, clarity, and feature prioritization.

Reflection

This project strengthened my ability to design for complex, real-world scenarios where users have competing goals, constraints, and distractions. Leading research while designing reinforced the importance of grounding product decisions in observed behavior.

With more time, I would expand testing in real grocery environments to further validate assumptions and refine context-specific interactions.

Thanks for reading!

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