Woolworths
Redesigning the Shopping Experience for Millions
Woolworths is Australia’s largest supermarket chain, serving millions of customers across 995 stores and online. As shopping behavior shifts to digital, providing a seamless, frictionless online shopping experience became critical to business growth and customer retention.
As Lead Product Designer, I led end-to-end product design across Woolworths’ native apps and website, improving the shopping journey, the recipes experience, checkout flows, and loyalty program engagement. My role extended beyond execution—I was responsible for growing the design team, scaling design processes, defining strategic direction, and aligning stakeholders across multiple teams.
📌 Key Outcomes:
• Increased checkout conversion rates by 10-15% through a smoother checkout and recipes experience.
• Boosted Everyday Rewards engagement by 20%, driving stronger customer retention.
• Scaled design processes & team efficiency, cutting design-to-development time by 30%.
Role: Lead Product Designer
Project: Native iOS, Android and Web Design
Year: 2019 – 2021
Understanding the Challenge
The challenge was clear: How do we create a seamless, intuitive shopping experience across mobile, web, and in-store interactions?
Customers needed a faster, more intuitive way to browse, shop, and manage their rewards, while the business aimed to increase conversion rates and customer loyalty. We needed to balance business goals with customer experience, ensuring a frictionless shopping journey.
To do this, we focused on deep user research, identifying pain points, and aligning cross-functional teams to execute a unified design vision.
Key Discovery Activities:
• User Interviews & Surveys → Engaged hundreds of customers to understand their shopping behaviors.
• Persona Development → Defined user archetypes to guide experience design.
• Competitive Analysis → Evaluated industry benchmarks to find opportunities for differentiation.
• Cross-Team Workshops → Aligned stakeholders through Problem Statement & Ideation Sessions.
Turning Insights into Solutions
With a clear understanding of user needs, we transitioned into concept development and prototyping for various solutions with recipes and checkout experiences, ensuring our designs were validated before launch. We followed an iterative design process, moving from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity designs, constantly refining based on feedback.
How We Brought Concepts to Life:
• Wireframing & Prototyping → Built low-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes for early validation.
• User Testing → Ran usability tests with real customers, refining key interactions.
• Research Documentation → Created clear, visual research decks to align product, design, and engineering.
Two food-specific Archetypes
Survey Insights Synthesis
A section of a Competitor Analysis
Design Execution
Once validated, we moved into high-fidelity UI design and final execution, ensuring scalability and consistency across platforms.
Using Figma and a component-based design system, we delivered polished, user-friendly interfaces that made shopping easier and more engaging.
✨ Key Deliverables:
• End-to-end wireflows mapping every touchpoint in the shopping journey.
• Clickable prototypes for usability testing & stakeholder alignment.
• Final UI designs using a scalable design system, reducing inconsistencies across the platform.
A shopping journey map
A Teardown Analysis of Walmart
Low Fidelity wireframes for early testing
Slide from a research survey presentation deck
Slides from a user testing results presentation deck
Slides from a user testing results presentation deck
Final wire flows for a collectibles project
Final Implementation & Optimization
Design is never “done”—post-launch, we closely monitored the performance of various features we created around shopping and creating recipes and continuously optimized based on real user data and feedback.
📈 How We Optimized After Launch:
• Analyzed user behavior & heatmaps to refine interactions.
• Ran A/B tests on key pages to improve conversion rates.
• Gathered direct customer feedback for continuous iteration.
🚀 Collaboration with Development:
• Partnered with engineers to ensure pixel-perfect implementation.
• Provided detailed specs & animations to enhance user interactions.
• Maintained a feedback loop with developers, ensuring seamless execution.
What These Projects Achieved
This project resulted in measurable improvements for both users and the business:
📊 Business Impact:
✔ Increased checkout conversion rates by 10-15% through a smoother checkout flow.
✔ Boosted Everyday Rewards engagement by 20%, driving higher customer retention.
✔ Reduced design-to-development cycle time by 30%, accelerating product releases.
🎯 Customer Experience Improvements:
✔ Created a faster, more intuitive shopping experience.
✔ Reduced friction in checkout & rewards redemption, leading to higher user satisfaction.
✔ Built a scalable design system, ensuring long-term consistency and efficiency.
Reflections & Learnings
Leading this project reinforced the importance of:
✨ User-centered decision-making – Research and iteration ensured we solved real customer pain points.
✨ Cross-team collaboration – Aligning product, design, and engineering streamlined execution.
✨ Continuous optimization – The best experiences evolve through real user data and testing.
This case study is a testament to how research-driven design, collaboration, and iteration can drive measurable impact at scale.
© Julio Castellano