Bringo: Rethinking Online Grocery Shopping

The work that we have been doing with Bringo has dealt with various sources of difficulty throughout their ecosystem. Whether it was rewriting the fundamental everyday processes or entirely launching new features from the ground up, here is a look at how we resolved them.

People were spending excessive time trying to find items, as the current methods of searching and navigating were at odds with the way ordinary shoppers actually speak and look for products in real life. This search difficulty directly impedes customers from making a purchase and has a negative effect on user retention. 

Because of the friction points that had been identified during the alignment and discovery phase, we completely restructured both the vendor architecture and the search process. We redesigned the category pathways and search behaviour so that they reflected natural user intent, making sure that common everyday terms gave immediate access to the correct results without requiring users to carry out manual workarounds.

The improvements made it easier for customers to complete their purchases, which helped the test score to rise from 3.8 to 4.5 out of 5.

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The path from cart to final checkout suffered from hidden usability issues. Because the interface hadn't evolved alongside fast-moving competitors, users experienced a high-friction journey when moving items from their basket to completed orders. Every unnecessary friction point or unclear step at this stage directly increased cart abandonment, stalling conversions just as shoppers were ready to check out. 

Following the alignment and prioritization established during our two-day Design Sprint with Bringo’s cross-functional team, we targeted the cart and checkout steps directly. We improved the entire payment and submission process by eliminating any unnecessary friction and reorganized the interface elements according to real user behaviours that had been confirmed during testing.

The redesigned cart and checkout process received a score of 4.6 out of 5, which represents a significant improvement on Bringo's present score of 3.9.

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Once an order had been placed, the customers were taken through a stage at which they had very little opportunity to see what was happening behind the scenes. The estimated delivery times were generally inaccurate or failed to offer real-time updates, leading shoppers to feel anxious and causing a large number of support requests which could have been avoided. In grocery delivery, post-purchase transparency is a core pillar of customer trust. When users cannot track their order status reliably, brand loyalty can drop sharply.

To prevent this, we made it possible for users to obtain clear and trustworthy information about the status at each major stage of the delivery process, so that they could easily see where their order was and when it would arrive without having to guess or ask for updates.

This feature hit a flawless 5.0 out of 5, proving that honest status updates instantly eliminate customer anxiety.

A universal pain point in online grocery shopping is remembering a forgotten item just after placing an order. Previously, Bringo's app lacked any capability to modify an existing order. If a customer forgot milk or bread, their only option was to abandon what they were doing and start an entirely new, separate order from scratch. This rigid technical limitation created immense user frustration and drove up delivery overhead for redundant trips.

Because no version of this capability existed previously, we built the add-on order flow entirely from the ground up. We designed an intuitive method which enabled users to safely add items to an active order during a particular operational period, incorporating it smoothly into the newly arranged vendor and checkout framework.

This new feature brought about the greatest single improvement in the whole project, rising from an initial score of 3.0 to a perfect 5.0 out of 5. The "before" score of 3.0 reflects how people rated that phone-call workaround.

A study of more than 800 online grocery shoppers found that 58% of them regularly come across out-of-stock items, and almost half of them will change grocers if the problem isn't quickly resolved within the app. With Bringo, the process of dealing with out-of-stock situations had to rely completely on calling the delivery driver after the order had already been picked up, a method which succeeded in only about 25% of cases and led to frustration for both shoppers and drivers. 

We created a replacement procedure within the app which eliminated the need for the phone call. At that point, customers had the option of pre-selecting their preference for substitution or of looking over and immediately approving the alternatives on their screen while the shopper was still in the aisle. 

In testing, the new in-app replacement process received a score of 4.9 out of 5, which represents a significant improvement on the previous baseline of 3.3.