Overview
Project Title: Fresh Assortment Discovery – MakroPro App
As MakroPro considered expanding its digital grocery platform to include fresh food, leadership faced a critical question: Can our customers trust and adopt fresh product purchases online? At the time, the app offered no fresh items, and most B2B customers still relied on traditional in-store or supplier relationships for perishable sourcing.
To explore this opportunity and de-risk future investment, I led an end-to-end UX discovery project—from framing the problem space to conducting deep research, synthesizing insights, identifying opportunity areas, validating concepts, and defining strategic KPIs.
The objective was to bring clarity to both user behavior and business potential by answering:
- What are the expectations and behaviors of HoReCa buyers when purchasing fresh products?
- How might we design a trustworthy, conversion-ready experience aligned with their offline mental models?
- What UX opportunities exist in the market, and how can we differentiate?
This case study walks through the structured UX methodology I applied — illustrated with real artifacts — to turn ambiguity into actionable strategy for product and leadership teams.
1. 🖼 Generative Research: Mapping Mental Models & Trust Drivers
Context
HoReCa customers still sourced fresh food offline, relying on personal supplier relationships and real-time judgment. To design a usable experience, we needed to understand the deeper psychology behind those choices.
UX Challenge
The digital team lacked insight into customer mental models for purchasing perishable goods. Without this, we risked designing features that didn’t align with real-world buyer behavior.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I designed and conducted in-depth generative interviews with key customer segments. Using empathy mapping and affinity clustering, I extracted behavioral insights about trust formation, freshness assessment, substitution handling, and delivery preferences.
Insight Extracted
Buyers didn’t just want “fresh” — they wanted assurance.
Key emotional drivers included:
- Confidence in quality (without seeing/touching)
- Clarity of product details (cut, weight, shelf life)
- Quick resolution when issues arise
Impact
These mental models became the backbone for UX decision-making. They grounded future flows in how users think, not how the business sells.
Context
While insights revealed user attitudes, we needed to capture the full operational and emotional context of how customers currently purchase fresh products — including offline behaviors and coping mechanisms.
UX Challenge
The existing journey was invisible to the product team. There was no shared understanding of pain points, service gaps, or critical touchpoints that could inform a meaningful online alternative.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I led a current-state journey mapping effort using insights from field research. I layered task flows, emotional states, service constraints, and fallback actions to paint a complete picture of the buying experience across planned and urgent scenarios.
Insight Extracted
The biggest pain points were:
- Lack of real-time freshness info
- Breakdowns during substitutions and refunds
- Misalignment between online UI and how buyers think in urgency
Impact
This journey map reframed internal assumptions. It shifted discussion from “what features to build” to “what moments to fix,” enabling the product team to focus on high-impact UX opportunities.
2. 🖼 UX Competitive Benchmarking: Revealing Market Gaps & Standards
Context
With a clearer view of customer expectations, we turned outward to evaluate how leading platforms handle fresh product discovery and presentation.
UX Challenge
There was no internal benchmark for how fresh food should be represented online. The team lacked visibility into how competitors addressed freshness, trust signals, or product detail clarity.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I led a UX-focused competitive analysis across four digital grocery and fresh product platforms: Freshket, HappyFresh, GrabMart, and Maknet. I assessed them using UX heuristics—category visibility, content depth, decision support, and trust reinforcement.
Insight Extracted
- Product pages lacked consistent cut/weight/origin info
- Platforms failed to distinguish fresh items from general groceries
- Refund and support flows were hidden or unclear
Impact
This analysis helped us define UX success criteria for fresh product experience and revealed clear whitespace opportunities to position MakroPro as a leader in the category.
3. 🖼 Quantitative Validation: Prioritizing Buyer Decision Drivers
Context
Qualitative insights had highlighted emotional and behavioral drivers. We now needed quantitative evidence to prioritize product attributes and support stakeholder alignment.
UX Challenge
We needed to validate what truly drives conversion behavior at scale — beyond anecdotes — to influence roadmap prioritization with data.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I designed and launched a quantitative survey with 71 customers to test the weight of factors like freshness, pricing, product origin, and refund confidence. I collaborated with stakeholders to ensure alignment on survey goals and helped analyze the results for decision-making impact.
Insight Extracted
- 93% cited freshness and price as top decision drivers
- Origin and shelf life were less emphasized but still relevant
- Post-purchase support ranked surprisingly high
Impact
The results reinforced design priorities for transparency, pricing clarity, and freshness labeling. It also gave product and business teams a shared data-backed lens for feature trade-offs.
4. 🖼 Synthesis & Opportunity Mapping: Bridging Research into UX Strategy
Context
At this point, we had robust insight across qual and quant research, but it needed to be synthesized into a direction the product and design teams could act on.
UX Challenge
Teams often struggle to connect rich research with actionable design. We needed to translate insight into prioritized opportunity areas with strategic clarity.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I led a synthesis sprint to cluster insights by need state, then mapped them against business feasibility. Using this, I facilitated a cross-functional workshop to frame opportunity zones—from homepage freshness visibility to improved product use-case categorization.
Insight Extracted
Four key UX opportunities emerged:
- Reinforce trust through freshness signals
- Elevate product details for decision support
- Simplify ingredient customization
- Clarify refund and replacement policies
Impact
This became the foundation for UX concept directions. It gave the product team a clear “why” behind each feature idea — backed by user need, not just intuition.
5. 🖼 UX Concept Framing: From Insight to Design Direction
Context
With opportunity areas in hand, it was time to explore how the MakroPro platform could uniquely solve these problems through thoughtful UX design.
UX Challenge
How do we translate behavioral insights into interfaces that build confidence, streamline selection, and fit into the mental model of offline buyers?
🔧 My Role & Approach
I collaborated with the product designer to explore UX concept directions. I helped define content requirements, component structures, and decision-aid moments (e.g., freshness markers, cut selectors, weight options).
Insight Extracted
These concepts centered on replicating offline buying cues:
- “This product is freshly packed today”
- “See cut examples before selecting”
- “Choose shelf life duration needed”
Impact
Our designs introduced digital trust signals that previously only existed through human interaction. They laid the groundwork for prototype testing and eventual MVP prioritization.
6. 🖼 Usability Testing: Evaluating Concepts in Buyer Contexts
Context
Designs were in place, but we needed to validate whether the proposed experience addressed real user needs and friction points.
UX Challenge
Trust is fragile — and usability issues in high-context purchases (like fresh food) could break adoption early.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I created and moderated task-based usability tests, asking users to complete real scenarios like “Order 3kg of chopped pumpkin.” I evaluated comprehension, trust, and decision ease.
Insight Extracted
- Users hesitated without cut/size context
- Filters were helpful but misaligned with shopping logic
- Confidence increased when freshness dates were prominent
Impact
The findings helped us refine UX copy, content hierarchy, and interaction flows before implementation, saving dev time and reducing risk.
7. 🖼 Insight Summarization: Driving Alignment Through Storytelling
Context
With research and validation complete, I needed to distill findings into a format that could influence decision-making across product, business, and design.
UX Challenge
Stakeholders don’t read research decks. We needed narrative storytelling to drive alignment and support clear prioritization.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I built a structured insight report, synthesizing quotes, data, emotional drivers, and UX implications. I grouped findings under behavioral themes like uncertainty, trust, and workflow friction.
Insight Extracted
Each theme directly linked to design recommendations, business opportunity, and user value.
Impact
This summary became a strategic asset — referenced in product roadmap planning, team prioritization, and leadership conversations.
8. 🖼 Defining Success Metrics: From Research to Measurable Impact
Context
The final step was ensuring that insights didn't just inform design — but also future measurement and validation post-launch.
UX Challenge
Without KPIs, we risked delivering features with no way to evaluate real-world success or user value.
🔧 My Role & Approach
I partnered with product analysts to define UX-aligned success metrics, such as:
- Task completion rate (e.g., buying a custom-cut product)
- Click-through rate on fresh categories
- AOV for fresh orders
- Drop-off points during checkout
Insight Extracted
We layered qualitative and quantitative signals into a tracking framework tied to business goals.
Impact
This ensured a seamless handoff to implementation teams — and closed the UX loop from research to ROI.
