Helping small businesses stay on top of inventory, reduce waste, and protect their customers.
Expiry APP
Role
Tools
I designed a tool for small businesses to track expiration dates of retail goods to prevent waste, find opportunities for sale items and improve efficiency of the date-checking process.
Designer
Figma, Figjam
Small businesses have a lot to keep track of in terms of expiring food, and often a very small team of employees to help them do so. Having worked in retail myself where I’ve seen these constraints first-hand, such as being short-staffed with lots of responsibilities to manage, certain tasks take the back burner. I wanted to create a fool-proof way to track inventory that automatically highlights expired and expiring soon food to save time and effort manually checking dates.
The problem
Expiry is made for small businesses that lack expensive inventory tracking software. It is a mobile app that owners and employees alike can use to track and find expired goods, reducing food waste and creating opportunities to mark down food before it needs to be tossed. It is also meant to save time manually checking expiration dates, highlighting which sections can be skipped in expiration date checking.
The Solution
I started by interviewing the owner of a local café/market that has a large selection of retail goods to understand their process of accounting for expiration dates.
Research
I learned the café has no centralized system or digital tool to help track expiration dates. Every date is checked manually.
It takes about 30 minutes to check all of the expiration dates, which is done once a week for over 250 items.
The last time they found an expired product was 1 week prior to the interview, which was due to staff error.
Products near their expiration date can be sold at a discount, rather than tossing at the time of expiration.
Key Insights
During our interview I found out that every front-of-house staff member is involved in the date checking process, not just the owners.
The users
Owners
Baristas/prep team
Many platforms exist to help businesses track inventory, but not so many focus on expiration date tracking for smaller businesses. Most existing tools are built for larger operations with more complex inventory tracking focused on things like forecasting and stock management.
These tools are usually over complicated for small teams that want to focus on expiration date visibility and quick actions rather than full inventory management.
competitive analysis
Next, I mapped out a realistic user flow of a store employee using Expiry during their weekly expiration check. Having worked in retail, I know these checks are rarely calm, focused moments. Instead, they’re usually squeezed between customers, restocking, and time pressure.
USER FLOW
WIREFRAMES
The wireframes explore how a small business owner might review expired inventory during a weekly check. Screens are designed to surface urgent items first and support quick actions, such as marking products as tossed or deleting from inventory completely.
Design
The Expiring Soon screens are meant to give an overview of what’s expiring when. There are 3 sections of varying freshness indicators (Fresh, Expiring Soon and Expired) that are color coded to create urgency and clearly convey what needs attention.
Expiring Soon - Homepage
Adding Inventory
There are two ways to add a product to the app’s inventory, either by scanning its barcode or by entering the details of the product manually.
The Inventory dashboard gives a detailed breakdown of inventory health and another way to see which products are expiring soon or are already expired. The Inventory Health section provides a more detailed breakdown by category of goods that have gone bad, as well as insights into which categories perform the best and worst.
Inventory
To evaluate the usability of the app, I did an in-person testing session with the same owner of the shop I interviewed for my research. I tasked her with trying to find what was expired and expiring soon just by looking at the homepage. I noticed she struggled to read the text. It became clear that relying on colors to emphasize freshness levels was not cutting it, the text needed to be bigger. She said she could not read the text without her glasses. One of the biggest changes I made was changing the text size from 11pt to 15pt in most cases. I also took this opportunity to refine the color palette and polish the overall design.
Test & Iterate
Final Designs
I got rid of some unnecessary buttons including the “Mark as Used Anyways” and “Change Expiration Date.” The shop owner alluded to the fact that if product is expired, it cannot be used anyways. She also stressed the fact there should be very little room for error when entering the expiration dates in the first place.
Expiring Soon - Homepage
Adding Inventory
Along with adding a background to the “Add Items” text to make it more readable, I also matched my brand colors to the CTA buttons.
I made the text more readable on both of the Inventory dashboard screens and fixed some contrast issues, like making the text black on the needs attention card.
Inventory
I learned a valuable lesson about typography and designing with the correct font size for mobile interfaces. I also learned the importance of research to gain real-world insights such as how businesses are dealing with expiring goods in real life and how to use design to solve a problem.
One of the most important lessons I learned was the value of testing designs in person, as this helped me not design in a silo. Sitting with real users and watching them interact with my designs revealed friction points I never would have considered if I kept the design to myself.