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Watchlist hero — Woolworths app specials and notifications Watchlist app — My Watchlist and push notification screens
Case Study

Watchlist

Helping customers find value in their weekly shop in a mobile-first environment.

Role Product Designer
Team App Product, Engineers, Marketing, Copywriting
Outcome Drove 2.5x higher eCommerce conversion rate among users, contributing to $17.4m in attributed product revenue online and $94.7m in total influenced online revenue over one year.

The problem

Due to the cost of living crisis post-covid, Australians were looking for ways to get more value from their weekly shop. Customers were also frustrated with not being able to purchase items that were out of stock. We hypothesised that a Watchlist can solve for these pain points as it allowed customers to monitor products and receive alerts for when they are back in stock, on special or have rewards offers. Aligned with Woolworths' mobile-first strategy and due to the reliance on push notifications, Watchlists were planned exclusively for the mobile apps.

Research and discovery

My role

I took ownership of the Watchlist initiative partway through its lifecycle as a result of a company restructure. My focus was on creating clarity, momentum and confidence across design and delivery. Key contributions included:

•Synthesising existing proprietary research, early concepts and work-in-progress designs.
•Co-leading a cross-functional kickoff workshop with Product, Engineering and the Tribe Lead to align on customer problems, constraints and success measures.
•Evaluating the existing design approach against scope, timelines and technical feasibility.
•Creating and iterating on design concepts, validated through remote usability testing and stakeholder reviews.
•Supporting additional quantitative research to help resolve stakeholder uncertainty and align on prioritisation.

Research insights

I inherited a well-researched problem space and leveraged existing insights to accelerate design delivery without re-running studies. Key insights that shaped the direction of Watchlists:

•Forgetting, not price sensitivity alone, drives missed purchases. Proprietary Rewards research revealed "I wanted to shop it but forgot it was on sale" as a top 3 reason customers didn't purchase an item in a given week. This highlighted timing and recall as critical problems to solve.
•Specials are a primary purchase trigger for many customers. Past research showed some customers only buy certain products when they are on sale, reinforcing the importance of making specials easy to track and act on.
•Monitoring specials is fragmented and effortful. Concept testing revealed customers were using multiple tools (Catalogue, Buy Again, My Specials carousels) to track preferred items and expressed a desire for a central place in the Woolworths app to monitor preferred items for specials with less effort.
•Out-of-stock items create dead end experience. Voice of Customer feedback, store reviews and customer testing consistently showed frustration when items were unavailable, with limited guidance on what customers could do next.
•Monitoring specials is the most desirable use case for Watchlist. A Kano study showed monitoring items through the specials cycle as the most desirable Watchlist use case (73% net positive average across eCom and in-store customers). Back-in-stock notifications received a more moderate 57.5% net positive average, while proactive communications were broadly undesirable due to existing notification fatigue.
Research insight table 1 Research insight table 2

Design approach

When I joined the project, design exploration had expanded beyond Watchlists into redefining the broader 'save to list' experience. While this direction had potential, it would have required fundamental changes to both the app architecture and the user experience which would have prolonged the time needed to deliver Watchlist to production. To reduce development risk while delivering customer value sooner, we descoped the broader list redesign. Following a technical review, we also descoped alerting customers to reward offers within their Watchlist and deferred them to a potential future iteration.

Further design exploration and UX research revealed that customer requirements for back-in-stock alerts differed fundamentally from those for specials alerts. In particular, customers wanted back-in-stock notifications to be specific to the stores and fulfilment methods they regularly use. Supporting both alert types would have introduced additional complexity into Watchlist, making it more appropriate to decouple them. To further reduce scope, we chose to focus on delivering specials alerts within Watchlist. This decision was supported by earlier research showing that back-in-stock alerts scored lower in desirability than specials alerts.

Final design

The final Watchlist experience enables customers to:

•Save their favourite products to monitor for specials
•Opt into push notifications for specials in their Watchlist
•Reduce effort and missed opportunities during their weekly shop
Final Watchlist design screens

Impact

Watchlist users consistently outperformed non-Watchlist users across three key eCommerce metrics:

17.87% Add to cart rate

Compared with 7.14% for non-Watchlist users

$199 Average order value

Compared with $194 for non-Watchlist users

45.7 Average items per order

Compared with 44.4 for non-Watchlist users

Over a one-year period, the feature contributed $17.4m in directly attributed product revenue and $94.7m in total influenced online revenue, driven by over 100k weekly active users engaging with the feature every week.

Reflection

Inheriting this project mid-stream reinforced the importance of good design being as much about restraint as it is about execution. By reassessing scope early, grounding decisions in existing research and clearly articulating trade-offs to stakeholders, we were able to ship something meaningful without over engineering it.

What surprised me post launch was how customers were actually using Watchlist. Fresh produce and weekly staples dominated the top 10 items added to cart from the Watchlist. This revealed that the feature had evolved beyond its original specials tracking intent into a broader weekly shopping utility. That's a distinction worth designing for in future iterations.