PopCorn
Year
Worked with
Goals
2025
1 Front-End Developer, 1 Back-End Developer
A grocery price-sharing app designed to help users find the best deals and connect with their local community.
Background
When was the deal?
This project began with a simple frustration: discovering that a bag of popcorn I had bought was on sale just days earlier!
While there are many ways to find grocery prices online, we realized that getting a comprehensive view of all available deals was far from simple. We found that local stores often lacked a robust online system, and there was no single platform that allowed us to easily compare the prices of a product across multiple markets.
Key Problems
Can't we see them all at a glance?
Scattered Information: Grocery deals were scattered across various sources such as individual store websites, weekly flyers, and social media posts, making it a time-consuming manual process for shoppers to find the best prices.
The Local Information Gap: While many deal apps exist, they primarily focus on major chains with established online systems, leaving out local markets.
Our Solution
We set out to build a community-driven mobile platform that directly addresses the fragmented information problems. Our solution was designed to be a unified hub.
Solve the Information Gap
Instead of relying on a broken system of individual websites and outdated flyers, we empowered users to become active contributors.
Our platform allows users to share real-time price updates and in-store promotions they discover, and provide accurate information from local markets.
Create a Unified View of Deals
We imagined a single place to compare the price of a single product across multiple stores. By crowdsourcing this data, we could provide users with a comprehensive view of all available deals, helping them make smarter purchasing decisions.
Encourage a Collaborative Community
We built a platform where users could not only consume information but also contribute to a shared pool of knowledge.
Features like posting deals, leaving comments, and receiving badges for contributions were designed to encourage active participation and build a valuable community around saving money.
Wireframe
Key Features of our MVP
1) Map-based Search
This core feature allows users to quickly find products and compare prices from various stores on a single, intuitive map interface.
Below the search bar, filter buttons allow users to prioritize and display prices from their favorite stores.
2) Real-time Price Posting
Users can post product prices and deals as they discover them. This direct user input ensures the information is current and accurate, fostering a highly collaborative environment.
To encourage active participation and high-quality contributions, users can earn "likes" and badges on their posts. It makes data more actionable and drives business success.
3) Price Comparison
This feature solves the common problem of comparing a single product's price across multiple grocery stores.
This list is organized by price, from lowest to highest, allowing users to immediately identify the most affordable option.
User Flow
Key Features of our MVP
Sign up
Sign in
Onboarding
Search
Search_Not_Found
Posting
Wireframe
Key Takeaways
Cross-Functional Collaboration
We held weekly meetings with a front-end and back-end developer to ensure our product goals were technically feasible. Through this process, I learned to design with implementation in mind, focusing on optimizing components for smoother development.
While I didn’t always catch every detail in the developers’ conversations, being curious enough to listen and ask questions gave me insights into the technical challenges behind design.
I'd like to emphasize that when communicating with the front-end developer, I learned the importance of making a design system and ensuring they were reusable to maintain overall design consistency. While I understood this conceptually, I found building a design system to be more challenging and a bigger learning curve than I had anticipated. To further my skills, I've started taking online courses on the design system.
Strategic Design
We spent significant time discussing the business side of the product, how to motivate users to contribute content, the importance of data acquisition, and ensuring the app's long-term viability. We addressed this by designing a gamification system with badges and a "like" button to motivate users to contribute content and build a dynamic, community-driven database.
I also drew on my academic background in Information Science to consider user privacy and information governance, ensuring we delivered accurate information responsibly.
Though the app wasn't fully launched, the six-month journey was a valuable simulation of a real-world product development cycle. It taught me how to collaborate, empathize, and learn to deliver a solution that is both visually appealing and strategically sound.
Challenges
Sole Designer
As the sole designer on this project, I owned the entire design process, from branding to UI/UX. The biggest challenge was independently validating my design decisions and charting a clear direction for the product. This experience, however, was a unique opportunity to lead the design vision and learn how to build a product from the ground, not just from a design perspective.
Project Management
Initially, our project lacked a holistic management system. While we used Notion for individual task tracking, we were so focused on our own work that we lacked a clear view of the project's overall progress. We needed an efficient documentation system and a dedicated approach to project management.
I learned firsthand that success isn't just about the final product; it's about the process. Small and consistent actions like meeting note-taking, clear documentation, and proactive communication became the foundation of our smooth workflow. This experience taught me that a well-managed process is just as vital as a great design, and a lesson I'll carry into every project.