Freshway, a grocery store in Nepal, wanted a simple app
Imagine you’re picking up groceries on the way home. You open the store’s app to check today’s offers, it feels busy and confusing, so you close it and walk in like you always do.
Freshway is a grocery store in Nepal that sells pretty much everything: groceries, fresh produce, cosmetics, dairy, liquor and accessories. Deliveries come in every day from different regions, and the store looks after the daily needs of over 1,200 people.
They wanted an app to make shopping easier for those customers. Not a giant online marketplace. Just something simple and clean that did a few things well:
- A buylist, so you know what to pick up
- Offers, deals, discounts and coupons
- Rewards and points
- Your purchase history
- Notifications, so you don’t miss any of the above
The outsourced design wasn’t working, so I asked to take it on
At the time I wasn’t an app designer at all. I made social media posts for Freshway. I knew Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro, and that was about it.
The app design had been outsourced, and it just wasn’t what we wanted. So I did the slightly brave, slightly silly thing: I asked if I could take it on. That same week I opened Figma for the first time.
The real problem was simple. A grocery app is something people open in a hurry. If it feels busy or confusing, they close it and go back to the shop like they always have.
Five things done well, and nothing else
Give Freshway’s 1,200+ regular shoppers a simple app to plan their shopping (a buylist, offers and rewards), and deliver it in three months.
People open a grocery app in a hurry. If it does five things really well and nothing else, they’ll use it instead of falling back to the old way.
- We ship on time, in three months.
- In our A/B tests, the simpler version of each screen wins.
- The client is happy with what we built.
I opened Figma for the first time and learned on the job
Look at what people already use
We surveyed five shoppers and compared the big Nepali shopping apps (Daraz, Sasto Deal and Bigmart) feature by feature, to see where Freshway could do something different.
Keep the app small on purpose
The button says “Add to Buylist”, not “Add to cart”, because the app was there to help you plan your trip, not replace it. Everything else fits in five tabs: Home, Offers, Statement, Rewards and Account.
What I said no toOnline ordering, more categories, lots of payment options and a chatbot. All good ideas, all saved for later.
Turn wireframes into the real thing
A fellow designer made the first wireframes, and I turned them into the final screens: layout, colour, type and every button state. Honestly, I was still learning Figma while doing it.
Test two versions and keep the clearer one
We A/B tested parts of the app. On home, the version that won drops the progress bar and makes the savings big. On account, it swaps the heavy purple card for a lighter header.
We delivered the whole app in three months
Umet and I delivered the app in three months, from December 2020 to March 2021. It covered sign up, home, categories, product pages, the buylist, offers, rewards, statements, reviews and notifications, plus the small screens people forget about, like “no internet” and “nothing found”.
“He was always willing to learn new things, and find innovative way to solve the given tasks.”Ramraj Ronil Sharma, CEO, Freshway Mega Mart
Sabin Subedi, Freshway’s CTO, put it more simply: I was the designer who later “learnt UI/UX working at our app project.” That’s exactly what happened.
Back to what I said I’d watch
Did we ship it on time?
Delivered in three months, December 2020 to March 2021.
Were the new screens clearer?
The A/B tests picked the “after” versions of home and account, so those are the ones we built.
Was the client happy?
Freshway’s CEO and CTO both wrote recommendations about the project, quoted above.
I asked for it before I felt ready
- I asked for it before I felt ready.I asked for the project and opened Figma for the first time that same week. Learning on a real project taught me faster than any course would have.
- Keeping it small is what made it work.We saved online ordering, payments and a chatbot for later. That’s the only reason three months was enough.
- Five people isn’t research.Today I’d talk to a lot more shoppers, ideally right there in the store, before drawing anything.
The versions that won took things away
I thoughtThe better screen would be the one with more on it.
Turned outThe versions that won took things away: no progress bar on home, a lighter header on account.
I thoughtI was a social media designer helping out on an app.
Turned outI loved it. This is the project that made me want to do this job, so I’m still pretty fond of it.
