EYOWO

BarginBin Web App

EYOWO

Designing a trusted, fast way to discover genuine bargains without cognitive overload

UX Research

Systems Thinking

Iterative Validation

Usability Testing

Behavioral Design

End-To-End Product Design

OVERVIEW

My Role

Ux Designer & Developer, Userability Tester

Deliverables

Wireframes, Prototyes, Testing Results, Final Product

Tools

Purpose

BargainBin is a community-driven web platform that helps people compare grocery prices across stores using real, user-submitted data rather than retailer-controlled pricing feeds.

The project was developed in response to rising grocery costs in Australia, where price transparency is limited by market concentration and consumers are often forced to manually compare prices across multiple retailers. BargainBin explores how trust, accuracy, and participation can be designed into a product that relies on crowdsourced data.

I worked end-to-end across UX research, product definition, interaction design, and UI design, collaborating closely with developers and an industry partner to deliver a functional, scalable web application

Problem

& Opportunity

Consumers face increasing pressure from rising grocery prices, yet lack clear visibility into which retailers offer the best value in their local area. Major supermarket chains dominate the market, limiting transparency and making price comparison both time-consuming and unreliable.

Existing deal and comparison tools often rely on:

Retailer-controlled pricing data
Incomplete coverage of smaller stores
Discounts without meaningful context

This creates a trust gap where users are unsure whether a “deal” is genuinely good.

Opportunity:
Design a platform that enables accurate, community-verified price comparison, allowing users to save money with confidence while reducing the effort required to shop smart.

Goals

& Constraints

Product Goals

Improve price transparency across grocery retailers
Enable users to compare prices quickly and confidently
Build trust through validation rather than promotion
Deliver a scalable foundation that could grow beyond the project timeframe

Key Constraints

No web scraping due to legal and ethical concerns
Reliance on user-generated data for pricing accuracy
Fixed academic timeline with limited development capacity
Web-first delivery for accessibility and maintainability

These constraints directly shaped both the product strategy and the design decisions, pushing the platform toward crowdsourcing, verification, and simplicity

Initial Whiteboard Sketching of Features & Screens:

User Research & Similar Platforms

To ground the product in real user needs, we focused on understanding how people currently:

Compare grocery prices
Decide whether a price is “trustworthy”
Balance time spent searching against potential savings

Research Activities

Review of existing grocery comparison and deal platforms
Analysis of user stories tied to saving money and reducing effort
Stakeholder input from the industry partner on long-term viability

Rather than aiming for exhaustive research, the focus was on identifying behavioral patterns that would influence product decisions, especially around trust and participation.

Research synthesis boards:

User Stories/Needs:

Design Strategy

Based on the insights and constraints, I defined three guiding principles:

Design for accuracy before scale
Trust had to be established before growth.
Make contribution visible and rewarding
Users should see how their actions improve the platform.
Reduce cognitive load at every step
Comparing and contributing prices should feel lightweight.

These principles guided prioritisation across features such as price voting, shopping lists, and rewards systems.

Early Concept Storyboards & Timeline:

Design Process

Initial wireframes and sketches explored:

Product discovery and search
Price submission flows
Shopping list creation and management

The goal was to map core user journeys before visual refinement.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes:

Medium- Fidelity Wireframes:

Iteration & Refinement

As development progressed, designs evolved to:

Reduce friction in price submission
Improve visibility of best prices by store
Introduce clearer hierarchy across product pages

Feedback from implementation and testing informed layout adjustments and interaction changes.

Different Variations of same pages

High-Fidelity Logos & Graphics

Hand-drawn sketches:

Usability Testing

Once the high-fidelity designs were completed, I designed and facilitated a structured user testing process using a google form survey that included test cases and feedback ratings. We invited participants to interact with the BargainBin platform and observed their navigation patterns, ease of use, and overall impressions.

After the user-testing sessions, all the participant responses were complied into a detailed table to identify recurring issues, usability challenges, and feedback. This allowed us to clearly visualise trends, highlighting areas needing refinement, and begin considering practical improvements. During the user testing, some participants misunderstood the purpose of the points system. I needed to adjust the survey and clarify the design so users could easily understand how it functioned. I then refined the test case questions and added visual cues into the design to explain the feature. In the surveys done after, users demonstrated a clearer understanding of how the points system worked. This improved my ability to translate the gamified concepts into intuitive and visually guided interactions.

Usability Survey with Excersises & Screen-Recordings

Survey Results: