App — Grocery delivery
REWE Lieferservice
At REWE Digital I designed user experiences for PENNY, REWE City and REWE Lieferservice — working alongside some of the strongest UX minds in the core team and shipping features across web and mobile.
The problem
REWE’s Lieferservice had to ship features fast across iOS, Android and web — while keeping a consistent design language at national scale.
My role
Designer in the core team of 14, later in a mobile team of four — feature concepts, brand design, user testing, illustration and interaction design across the Lieferservice app and rewe.de.
Core decision
Optimise for re-ordering, not discovery. Grocery is repeat purchase at 50–80 items per basket, which breaks conventional e-commerce checkout thinking.
The outcome
Contributed to the platform’s design system, shipped features across web and mobile, and introduced motion design concepts into the product.
01 ChallengeGrocery inverts nearly every assumption e-commerce is built on — basket size, repeat purchase, scarce delivery capacity, substitutions.
REWE is one of Germany's largest grocery retailers, and REWE Lieferservice is its delivery arm. At REWE Digital I designed across that ecosystem — Lieferservice, REWE City and PENNY — shipping features to iOS, Android and rewe.de.
Grocery is not a variation on normal e-commerce. It inverts nearly every assumption the category is built on, and the differences are structural rather than cosmetic:
Basket size breaks conventional checkout thinking
A typical online order contains one to three items. A weekly grocery order contains fifty to eighty. Every interaction that is acceptable at three items — a confirmation step, a scroll to review, a per-item action — becomes intolerable at eighty. Basket management stops being a checkout formality and becomes the core interface of the product.
Purchase is repeat, not discovery
People buy roughly the same groceries every week. That makes the primary job re-ordering rather than browsing, and it makes past orders, favourites and quick re-add far more valuable than recommendation or exploration. A grocery product that optimises for discovery is optimising for the wrong behaviour.
Delivery capacity is a scarce, perishable resource
Slots are finite, and an unsold Tuesday afternoon slot cannot be recovered. Slot selection therefore carries operational weight that ordinary shipping choice does not — it has to communicate genuine scarcity without manufacturing pressure, and it has to be legible early enough that a customer does not build an eighty-item basket only to find nothing available when they want it.
Substitutions are a trust problem
Fresh grocery has unavoidable availability gaps between order and pick. What replaces a missing item, and whether the customer consented to it, is where satisfaction in this category is actually decided. It is an interface problem with real consequences — the wrong substitution on a dietary or allergen-relevant item is a serious failure, not an inconvenience.
- Roughly how many customers or orders did Lieferservice handle in your period?
- Catalogue size — how many SKUs?
- Which of the constraints above did you personally work on? Name the features.
02 My roleA core team of fourteen, then a mobile team of four. Two different jobs.
I joined the core team of fourteen and later moved into a mobile team of four. Those are two different jobs. In the core team the work was as much about coordination as craft — aligning on shared patterns, keeping a design language coherent across web and both app platforms, and contributing to a system other designers also depended on. In a team of four, the surface narrows and the ownership deepens: fewer alignment conversations, and considerably more of the outcome resting on your own decisions.
The core team was where I learned the most. Working alongside experienced UX designers on a product at national scale set a standard for how design decisions get argued and defended that shaped how I have worked since.
- Designing feature concepts across the Lieferservice app and rewe.de.
- Contributing to the platform's design system and shared pattern language.
- Running user testing and feeding findings into feature decisions.
- Interaction design and prototyping for web and mobile.
- Illustration and motion design work supporting the product.
- Designing across sibling products — PENNY and REWE City — within a shared retail ecosystem.
03 Designing inside a shared systemA design system maintained only by a dedicated owner drifts away from what teams actually need.
Working across Lieferservice, REWE City and PENNY meant designing inside constraints set by other teams as often as setting them. Each product serves a different retail proposition — full-range delivery, urban convenience, discount — under a shared corporate structure, and each has its own brand expression. The shared design system had to carry enough to keep interaction patterns consistent while leaving room for genuinely different positioning.
My contribution to the design system was made from inside feature work rather than as a separate systems project: recognising when a problem I was solving was a recurring one, and pushing the solution back into the shared library instead of leaving it in a single flow. In a team of fourteen this is the practical mechanism by which a design system stays alive — systems maintained only by a dedicated owner drift away from what teams actually need.
- Which feature are you proudest of from this period? Write it up end to end.
- What was the problem, what did you try, what did testing say, what shipped?
- What did you contribute to the design system specifically — which patterns or components?
04 OutcomesShipped across iOS, Android and rewe.de at national retail scale.
Product
Shipped features across iOS, Android and rewe.de within one of Germany's largest grocery retail platforms, and introduced motion design concepts into the product.
Design practice
Contributed to a design system serving multiple retail products, and worked in both a large cross-functional core team and a small focused mobile team — two quite different modes of designing, each with its own demands.
Key learnings
