Gro Plus

Overview

Grocery prices in the UK fluctuate constantly across supermarkets, and shoppers rarely have the time — or patience — to manually compare prices across multiple apps and websites before deciding where to shop. Gro Plus was built to solve that exact problem. The app pulls daily prices and product data from major UK grocery websites, lets users search and compare items instantly, and then does the heavy lifting: it analyses a user's entire shopping list and recommends the single best supermarket to visit, balancing the lowest total basket cost, shortest distance, and fastest shopping time. I owned the project end to end — from early research and competitor teardown, through persona development, to final wireframes and UI design.

The Problem

While price-conscious shoppers want to save money on groceries, the current process often leads to overwhelming decision fatigue. Finding the best deals means opening multiple supermarket apps, manually comparing prices item by item, tracking unavailable products, and guessing which store truly offers the best value once travel and time are factored in — so most people just default to their usual habits. The design challenge: how might we help users compare prices effortlessly and confidently choose where to shop, without doing the complex math themselves.

Research & Discovery

I ran a research phase covering both the market and the user — a competitor teardown of existing price comparison and grocery apps focused on how (or whether) they helped users act on price data rather than just display it, and personas distilled from different shopping motivations, from budget-driven bulk shoppers to convenience-first urban shoppers.

Key insight: users didn't just want to see prices — they wanted a decision made for them. Comparison alone wasn't the value; recommendation was.

Designing the Experience

Seamless onboarding — a frictionless mobile number + OTP flow, alongside Facebook, Google, and Apple sign-in, to reduce drop-off at the very first screen.
A home screen built for quick action — personalised greeting, prominent search, and live fuel price context, with category browsing and daily deals just below.
Search built for comparison, not just discovery — dense, scannable product cards showing quantity and price range with a one-tap Add, plus a persistent cart summary bar.
A cart designed for clarity — product, quantity, and price range per item, with a clear running total and a handoff into the optimisation engine.

Smart Stores — the core differentiator

Instead of leaving users to compare manually, the Smart Stores screen does it for them, with three optimisation modes — Cheapest Deal (ranks stores by total basket cost), Minimize Distance (prioritises proximity), and Minimize Time (prioritises shopping speed) — each available in both single-store and multi-store recommendations.

My Process

Market and competitor research
User persona development
Information architecture and user flows
Low-fidelity wireframes
High-fidelity UI design and design system
Iteration based on usability considerations across flows (onboarding, search, cart, store optimisation)