ShopRunner by FedEx

ShopRunner is an annual membership offering free two-day shipping, free returns and other perks at hundreds of stores in its partner network. FedEx acquired ShopRunner and wanted to build its first consumer-facing native shopping experience.

The brief was to design, build and launch a native iOS and Android app in six months, in time for the holidays, and to bring ShopRunner's brand-new identity to life in a design system along the way. The challenge wasn't just the app. It was standing up an entirely new consumer product for one of the world's most recognized logistics brands.

I was the lead UX designer, embedded with the in-house team: a program manager, a product manager, a business analyst, two junior-to-mid UX designers, a content designer, a UX researcher, four mobile engineers, a technical delivery lead, a solutions architect and two QA engineers. We ran two-week sprints, with design and strategy reviews twice a week in front of the CEO of FedEx Dataworks, ShopRunner's COO and the heads of Product, Marketing, Technology and Design.

With that many stakeholders, the first job was getting everyone into the member's head. I opened discovery with a mindset exercise from the member's point of view, which surfaced five themes: a sense of control, the savvy shopper, the cross-brand shopper, the member who already knows the benefits, and the last-minute shopper.

Alongside UX Research we ran member interviews and contextual inquiry and audited existing reviews. We then built a single power-user persona, “Call-the-Shots Casey,” to settle debates and keep every decision member-first. Casey shops last-minute, across brands, and wants to know where everything is.

Journey mapping showed the stress wasn't in shipping. Two-day delivery and easy returns were already moments of delight. The pain was around them: members couldn't tell which stores were in the network, and when one order arrived in several packages, there was no easy way to know what was in each.

That question — what does the member truly need, not what could we build — started at the whiteboard and shaped every decision after it. Sketching sessions with the team framed the work as “how might we” prompts: personalize and contextualize by order status, feel bold and friendly but still trustworthy, and stay simple enough to read at a glance. Design became a by-product of listening across product, engineering, content and research, iterating against requirements, constraints, member needs and business goals at the same time.

Order tracking was the heart of the app, so it went from whiteboard to wireframes to high-fidelity comps first:

• Order list — cards built to scan on scroll, with room for labels like multiple packages or out-of-network orders
• Order status — branded illustrations for each stage: placed, on the way, almost there, ready for pickup, delivery issues
• Order details — the full delivery timeline, tracking number, items and help, all in one place
• Home and retailers — shopping by category with illustrated tiles, then into each retailer's store

I partnered with UX Research on two days of moderated usability studies with seven members in total, all of whom had bought through ShopRunner in the past six months. We tested the whole app, from welcome, sign-up and onboarding to orders, notifications and help. Four findings reshaped the order flows:

• Members didn't understand the status illustrations, so status moved into plain words at the top of each card
• Small retailer names made orders hard to find, so the retailer became the headline of each card
• Tracking status was hard to spot in the list, so each card led with where the order was and when it would arrive
• Package tracking was hard to read on the details screen, so the full travel history moved into its own sheet

ShopRunner's identity was brand new, so the app became its first real test. I built a design system around three visual roles: photography to spotlight each retailer, colored illustrations for product categories, and outline illustrations that act as the app's concierge in onboarding, empty states and help. Motion and transitions were designed alongside, within what our Flutter front end could support.

I designed, built and launched a new product in six months. In the first two months, the app reached 22,000 users and 19,000 monthly active users, with an 83% sign-up completion rate.

Testing backed up the craft, too. On a 1–7 Likert scale, members rated the app 5.7 for consistent look and feel and 5.7 for feeling fluid and natural. We always aim for 5.5 or higher.

I'd align with engineering on Flutter's constraints earlier. They ended up reshaping some interaction design and transitions after the fact, instead of informing them from the start.

Next, I'd go after one number. Members scored “this app will have an impact on my life” at just 3.4 out of 7, which pointed straight at habit-forming features: reorder, smart reminders and retailer recommendations based on purchase history. We'd already started exploring them.

I also learned that zero-to-one design is as much organizational as it is creative. The hardest design problems aren't always on the screen. They're in the room, with multiple organizations, twice-weekly reviews and competing definitions of done.

This project predates today's AI tools. Here's where they'd change the process:

• Research — surfacing themes and sentiment across reviews and workshop transcripts in minutes, instead of auditing them by hand
• Ideation — generating a wider set of information-architecture options before sketching, for a deeper set of trade-offs
• Prototyping — compressing the sketch-to-hi-fi loop, so more variants get tested before the team converges
• Content — drafting tone and copy variants to react to, while people keep the judgment on what's trustworthy and human