Pantry — A Grocery List That Plans Itself
A personal side project where I designed a shared grocery list app in Figma to stop my roommates and me from buying three bottles of olive oil and no eggs.
Role
Junior UX/UI Designer · Personal Project
Timeframe
Team
Solo project — I did the research, design and testing myself
My two roommates — my very first “users” and testers
10 remote participants — feedback across two rounds of usability testing on Maze
Problem
I share a flat with two roommates and our grocery shopping was chaos. We had a meal plan buried in Notes, a shopping list in our group chat, and nobody actually knew what was already in the fridge. We kept buying olive oil and forgetting eggs, every single week.
Before touching Figma, I ran a quick survey and a few casual interviews to see if other shared households had the same problem — turns out most did. I sketched a simple user journey map to see where the process kept breaking down, which was mostly at the “who's actually going to the store” step.
No single source of truth: the list lived in three different apps at once.
Duplicate purchases: nobody could see what was already bought.
No connection between meals and the list: planning a meal didn't add its ingredients anywhere.
Challenge
This was a nights-and-weekends personal project — no team, no developer, just me and Figma. I gave myself ten weeks and treated it as a clickable prototype rather than a shippable app, since I don't code.
The hardest part, as a newer designer, was scope control. I had ideas scribbled everywhere for recipes, budgeting, even a pantry-tracking feature with expiry dates. I forced myself to cut all of that and focus on one core loop: add a meal, get a smart list, shop from it.
A short survey plus 3 casual interviews with people in shared households
Low-fidelity paper wireframes before opening Figma
A basic clickable prototype with 12 screens
Solution
Pantry is a shared grocery list that automatically sorts items by store aisle, so you can shop from top to bottom without doubling back. I built it as a Figma prototype with components and auto layout, which was genuinely my first time using either seriously.
Add a meal, and its ingredients drop straight onto the shared list.
Aisle groups with a small tag showing which meal each item belongs to.
Live-feeling updates (simulated in the prototype) so everyone sees the same list.
I kept the UI intentionally minimal — big tap targets, one accent color, simple icons from a free icon set — since most of my test participants weren't especially “techy” and I didn't want the interface to get in the way.
Impact
I ran two rounds of remote testing on Maze with five people each. In round one, most testers couldn't find how to add a meal at all. I moved the “Add meal” button from a hidden menu to a big button at the bottom of the screen, and in round two everyone completed the task without help.
This project taught me just how much a single button placement can matter, and how easy it is as a junior designer to assume something is “obviously” findable when it's buried three taps deep.
testers added a meal without help once the “Add meal” button moved within thumb reach
5 of 5
across two rounds of remote usability testing in Maze
10 testers
replaced the Notes meal plan and the group-chat shopping list
1 shared list
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