GWS Tool
Web-Scraping tool
UI/UX
Prototyping
E-Commerce
Company
GWS Tool
My Role
Lead Designer and Developer
Timeline
1 month
Responsibilities
Design Research
Design Direction
Visual Design
Prototyping
Development
Deployment
Overview
GWS Tool is a user-friendly web application designed to streamline your shopping experience by providing a convenient platform to search for discounted items across South Africa's leading supermarkets. Featuring the top four retailers – Pick'n Pay, Checkers, Shoprite, and Woolworths – the tool enables consumers to effortlessly compare prices from various stores with just a single click, making the process quicker and more efficient.
See it live
Designed with simplicity in mind, provides a user-friendly interface for effortless price comparisons among South Africa's top supermarkets.GWS Tool enhances the shopping experience with a sleek design, emphasizing clarity and simplicity for quick and efficient comparisons.
[ Layout Concept ]
[ Low-Fidelity Prototype Design ]
[ Layout Concepts ]
[ Products Page ]
The Design Strategy
It's a known fact that most e-commerce sites use a lot of pop-ups and banners to keep users engaged with the site content and win their trust. While this is generally good for marketing purposes, sometimes it can derail users from the initial intent of visiting their site.
I opted to use a simple design approcah for this application, with clear headlines and call to actions to let users know where they can go to find what they are looking for. The listed supermarkets in the center of the top naviagtion let users know which store they can access and active. They can quickly switch the tabs to navigate to a different store to look for their desired items.
The challenges
My primary technical hurdle was optimizing the application's load time, as responses from the API were often delayed by several seconds, sometimes up to a minute, owing to the volume of data involved. To address this, I delved into understanding caching mechanisms and discovered that implementing Redis proved to be the most effective solution. The outcomes justified the effort invested in tackling this latency issue.
