Designing a Grocery Delivery App Through a Pandemic

How do you design grocery delivery for people who suddenly can't leave the house?

Context

PeerDrop was a London-based startup building a grocery delivery platform during COVID. I joined as Product Designer in August 2020, working remotely, and stayed through October 2022, designing the entire mobile app experience.

My Role

I led product discovery, UI/UX, and visual branding. That meant everything from competitor analysis to the design system the engineers built from.

Process

I started with competitor analysis, then went straight to users. The research that moved the needle most was a round of user interviews plus usability testing with 5 users across 2 core tasks:

Ordering independently: could a new user complete an order without help?
Reordering without rebuilding the cart: could a returning user repeat last week's shop in seconds?

Those two tasks exposed where the flow broke, and the fixes fed directly into a +34% order acceptance rate.

I also built the product's design system, which cut build cycles by 17%: the engineers stopped reinventing parts and started assembling them.

Outcomes

1,000+ beta users on the platform
Helped raise £40,000 in seed funding
+34% order acceptance rate after research-driven redesign
17% faster build cycles from the design system

Lessons

The one that changed how I work: involve engineers in the design lifecycle as early as possible. The designs that shipped fastest and broke least were the ones engineers had already poked at before they were "done." I've carried that into every role since, and eventually it turned into building things myself.