Loblaw

Order online, pick it up at the store.

PC Express is Loblaw's online grocery service. You fill a cart in the app or on the website and pick a time slot; a personal shopper walks the store and picks the order, and at most stores pickup is curbside.

It began in October 2014 as Loblaws Click & Collect and has grown to more than 700 pickup locations across Canada, running through Loblaw's grocery banners, from Loblaws and No Frills to Real Canadian Superstore. Each store has its own pickers, shifts and shelves, and each is a place where an item can go missing.

We became customers first.

We used PC Express ourselves and gathered stories from regular users. They repeated: items missing with no explanation, out-of-stock surprises, and no clear way to report it in the app.

To widen the evidence we scraped 2,237 negative reviews from the App Store and Google Play and clustered them into a pain-point map.

The problem wasn't only on the customer side.

Conversations with the PC Express UX team surfaced the other half of the story: shift handoffs, duplicated picking and unclear accountability for missing items.

We traced customer and colleague steps side by side and marked every point of friction. Here the findings follow one order: #14, a composite Saturday pickup, seen once as the customer and once as the colleague picking it.

The two sides meet at 9:20, when the oat beverage runs out. The colleague has to guess a substitute, and the customer finds out at the curb.

Designing for the numbers the team already watches.

PC Express tracks Perfect Order and OSAT. Perfect Order rewards accuracy but can penalise colleagues for stock they never had; OSAT drops with missing items, thin status updates and uneven support.

Our goal: more accuracy and transparency, without making the process unfair for the people doing the picking.

Small changes. Real impact.

We plotted every idea by impact and effort, then prioritised the changes the team could ship with the resources they already had:

Transparency before checkout.

Stock labels now separate regular, low-stock and out-of-stock items. Low stock prompts a substitution choice; out-of-stock items can be saved to a Restock Wishlist.

Customers rank up to three substitutes and see an estimated final price range, so there are no surprises on the receipt.

Accountability built into the workflow.

A synchronised, tabbed picking list lets colleagues multitask, save progress and hand off cleanly between shifts.

A fulfilment checklist before handoff makes sure every item in the order has been addressed.

Some systems are best understood as a story.

For the final deliverable I directed a service design film — locations, voiceover, edit and music — so the journey, its breakdowns and our fixes made sense to people who would never read a service map.