How I designed Walmart's contactless shopping experience, Scan & Go – allowing members to scan items with their phone as they shop, view real-time totals, and expedite the checkout process.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Platforms
Mobile
Industry
Retail
Timeline
8 months for MVP launch
Collaborators
Product designers, Product managers, Business partners, Design researcher, Engineers, Project managers, Analytics, Accessibility, Store associates and ops teams
Responsibilities
Research, discovery, cross-functional collaboration, testing, iteration, end to end design & execution, eng handoffs, VQA
Goal
Design a feature Scan & Go, for Walmart W+ members as an in-store benefit. It will allow members to scan items while in-store, as they add them to their physical basket. When they are ready to check out, users can pair with a SCO, confirm payment on their phone using their saved payment method in their account, and exit the store.
Results
Increased Scan & Go trial rates by 30% in pilot stores. Reduced checkout time by 25%, improving overall customer satisfaction scores. Received a patent for 'Exit Pass' unique design feature that allows users to exit seamlessly after payment in app.
How I made it happen
Situation
Walmart needed to drive in-store sales and app engagement while also reducing wait times at checkout lines. Provide a safe covid shopping experience for customers and a safe environment to help associates better serve the customers.
Task
Urgently create a feature that would gives customers a new way to shop with ease using their mobile phone to scan their items as they shop and pay on their phone, making checkout fast and easy.
Action
Identified key user pain points through research, mapped the full journey, and designed E2E experience with simplified onboarding, scan confidence cues, and store navigation with a Service design mindset. We refined the solution through in-store and mixed methods testing.
Result
Scan & Go became a strategic service for membership program and revenue driver for Walmart in-store. 105% growth in weekly transactions from ~275K in Jan → ~564K by Dec. Abandon Rate down from 41% → 16%. POS transfer rate dropped from 8% → 4%.
Research & Discovery
Goals
User: discover membership benefits, know who the user is, allow quick scanning of products, flexible cart, integrated payment and derive value from membership.
Business: launch to chain (4700+ stores), revenue from membership fees, increased awareness of benefits, increase digital touch-points adoption.
System: Integrate with the core Walmart native app and with the dynamic ‘store mode’ feature that's activated when a customer is geolocated in or near the store.
Key findings from one of the first research studies
Major expectation mismatch
Customers expected checkout to be fully integrated with shopping, but MVP still required visiting self-checkout, leading to disappointment.
What Customers Expected vs. Got
Expected: Scan items while shopping, pay on phone, walk out with exit pass
Got: Scan items, then still wait in line at self-checkout to complete purchase
Result: Felt inconvenient and time-consuming, not the time-saver they wanted
Core Insight: Customers don't want a scanning app - they want to eliminate traditional checkout entirely.
Recommendations
Short-term: Allow bagging while shopping, consolidate payment at self-checkout
Mid-term: Add produce weighing estimates, reduce wait times for W+ members
Long-term: Enable anywhere checkout, full produce weighing, integrate shopping lists
North star vision
Fully integrate checkout with shopping to eliminate traditional checkout friction entirely.
What some users said
“Some items don’t have barcodes — what do I do then? It breaks the whole flow.”
We created a customer journey map to build a better understanding of how customers find and interact with the scan and go tool and to discover opportunities for improvement. The map revealed a number of user problems and opportunities for improvement in the onboarding process as well as the tool in general.
Scan & Go’s success depended not just on sleek app design, but on navigating Walmart’s complex retail environments. We had to design around inconsistent store layouts, limited exit staffing, and legacy checkout infrastructure. Challenges included physical gates that blocked fast exits, lack of associate training, high turnover at SCO, and fraud risks from fake accounts. These realities required us to prototype flexible exit flows, limit certain item types in MVP, and integrate real-time security and support systems — ensuring a safe, scalable, and reliable experience across 4,700+ stores.
Experience Design
We grounded the experience in three core objectives:
Speed: Let customers scan, shop, and go with minimal delays.
Clarity: Ensure users know what’s happening at every step.
Trust: Build confidence through transparency and feedback.
These translated into feature-specific goals:
Seamless item scanning and cart building
Real-time subtotals for budgeting
Clear instructions for checkout and exit
A digital “exit pass” for validation
Identifying edge cases early on helped focus on how to handle complexity at scale.
Phases of design
Low-fidelity explorations helped lay the foundation of MVP and happy path flows.
Reviews & iterative design
Scaled and optimized flows through team reviews, leadership input, critiques and ongoing usability testing.
Intersection of service design
Service design thinking helped to frame the touch points and better understand the front & backstage players and design for them.
Integrating multiple platforms
Scan & Go touched multiple areas of the shopping journey and needed support from the checkout counters and front end associate devices for interventions.
Launching a brand-new membership feature during COVID came with its own set of challenges, but we moved quickly and efficiently. By closely collaborating with cross-functional partners across eComm, Store Ops, Engineering, and Marketing, we delivered a fully functional, end-to-end digital product that added real value for our members.
Onboarding screen for Scan & Go with quick access to how it works.
Clean and quick scanning experience to allow for real time budgeting.
Auto continuous scan or quick manual entry.
Quick adding of items and seeing totals for price conscious users.
Unique Scan & Go cart to view and complete shopping tasks.
Ask users to confirm number of items in cart to avoid discrepancies.
Eliminate friction at checkout and make it quick and easy by showing clear instructions.
Seamless scanning to continue payment and/ or transfer cart to a SCO if needed.
Successful integration will enable platforms to enable completing the transaction.
Exit Pass to be flashed at the point of exiting the store.
Problem: New user onboarding
Scan & go's onboarding consisted of a single page with bullet point details. For new users, this page was very easy to overlook/skip without digesting the information. It also didn't do a good good job explaining how the tool worked or how it would aid their shopping journey. With our end goal of creating and retaining new scan & go users, we completed a quick audit of our current onboarding experience and competitor solutions. Some of the issues that arose from this research included: too text heavy, no visual explanations, current version is easily missed/skipped.
For new users, this page was very easy to overlook/skip without digesting the information. It also didn't do a good good job explaining how the tool worked or how it would aid their shopping journey.
As we explored solutions we looked to competitors such as Instacart, Sam's Club, and Nike. In reviewing their onboarding experiences, and focussing on alleviating our red flags, we adjusted our design approach and transitioned to an onboarding wizard style.
Results & Outcomes
What’s working
Seamless Scanning Experience
Users appreciated the speed and responsiveness of scanning items on their phones.
The intuitive UI, large scan target, and real-time feedback gave them confidence and control.
Real-Time Cart & Budget Tracking
The running total feature became an unexpected budgeting tool.
Customers loved seeing how much they were spending as they shopped — especially helpful during inflation-heavy months.
+105%
Weekly transactions grew
From 274,900 in Jan to 564,000 in Dec FY25
Avg carts per week (FY26): 488,000
3500 users per day (on average)
+35%
increase in AOV
Increased from ~$40 to $54
75% of carts had 1–10 items (small, quick trips)
Cart abandonment rate dropped from 41% in FY23 to 16% in Fy25
17 seconds
speed of S&G transactions
4% of carts transferred to checkout down from 8%
SCO Payment Only (Ready to Pay to Confirmation): ~25–65 seconds
With Interventions (e.g., SCO host assistance): ~75 seconds
What needs work
Checkout Handoff Friction
The need to pair with a self-checkout station broke the mental model of a “truly contactless” experience.
Users felt let down when they realized they still had to queue up or wait for assistance at the end.
Gaps in Associate Training
Many associates weren’t trained on how to support Scan & Go users, especially during pairing, audits, or tech errors.
This led to longer wait times and reduced trust in the system.
Patent Contributor – Exit Pass Interface for Scan & Go
I hold a design patent for the graphical user interface of the Exit Pass, developed as part of Walmart’s Scan & Go experience. This UI element served as the final digital confirmation of purchase, enabling contactless exit and reinforcing customer trust in the mobile checkout journey. The design played a critical role in validating transactions without traditional receipts — a key interaction in delivering a truly touch-free, frictionless in-store experience during the height of the pandemic
Learnings
User feedback is invaluable
Collecting feedback and understanding user preferences, expectations, and challenges was crucial in creating an digital in-store experience applying service design thinking frameworks. Covid made it hard to collect feedback but it was imperative to think out of the box to conduct a mixed methods / journal study using storyboards.
Simplicity is key
Simplifying the onboarding process, transferring cart and checking out proved to be highly beneficial. By reducing complexity and eliminating unnecessary information, users found using scan & go less complicated and more helpful to their shopping experience.
Progressive disclosure
Instead of overwhelming users with a barrage of information right from the start, introducing concepts gradually allowed them to better grasp and retain information. Interventions and edge cases were handled contextually to reduce the cognitive load.
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