Waitrose boosts in-store shopper experience with new app feature

James Kay - Group Product Lead - Apps, Waitrose

The challenge

Success in the highly competitive grocery retail space means constantly devising new ways to improve the customer experience to drive convenience, value and loyalty. The mobile shopping app has played a key role by making it easy for shoppers to order groceries online, either for home delivery or in-store collection. As a long-standing technology partner, Mindera has worked closely with Waitrose Digital, the technology arm of the major UK supermarket chain, leading mobile app development. This spans from initial launch to maintaining and implementing exciting features to keep the app in sync with the latest technology.

This includes initiatives like holding Exploration Days to inspire ideas for new app features. The first such event brought together the Mindera iOS teams working for Waitrose, breaking software engineers away from their daily routine to focus on experimenting with new concepts and technologies. During the day-long session a compelling case was identified to implement Live Activities – interactive notifications that display useful real-time information on a shopper’s mobile phone. The aim was to boost the in-store app shopping experience for customers, an area frequently overlooked in app development. Shoppers can interact with these Live Activities, which conveniently appear on their locked mobile screen when the app is enabled in the background, as well as the Dynamic Island space on those mobile phones with the feature. The challenge was to discover the best features to be introduced to benefit Waitrose shoppers and then how to implement them with minimum disruption to their app usage.

The solution

Before the design of the Live Activities installation could begin, thorough planning and extensive research was carried out to help make integration with the existing app architecture as seamless as possible. Mindera design and development teams then collaborated closely to ensure a smooth and engaging shopper experience.

With a refined design in place, the development team began implementing and integrating the new feature in the Waitrose app. First, to house all Live Activities-related elements and views for the user interface (UI), a new WidgetExtension was added. This also allows new Live Activities and widgets to be added quickly and easily in the future. The UI was implemented using the SwiftUI framework, using Apple’s WidgetKit and ActivityKit.

The Mindera team had to overcome several challenges during this development phase. For instance, the 4Kb data limit on Live Activity updates limited the ability to display up-to-date product images, which could be used, for example, to show customers the last item they had scanned in store. To solve this problem, AppGroups was integrated, which allows the app to write and read up-to-date product images and display them correctly inside the Live Activities’ view. With the development work completed, extensive testing was conducted to ensure Live Activities behaved as intended and functioned flawlessly before the feature was finally released.

The results

Thanks to the new Live Activities feature, Waitrose customers shopping in store can now view key up-to-date information on their shop on the lock screen or Dynamic Island area (just above the camera) of their mobile phone screen without the need to access the app. This includes a running total cost of their shop, last item scanned and product information.

This timely, relevant and easily available information significantly improves the in-store shopping experience. The new feature also provides an instant route back to the Waitrose app, should customers need to access it quickly.

About Waitrose

Founded in 1904 in Acton, London, supermarket chain Waitrose, part of the John Lewis Partnership, has 329 shops across Great Britain and the Channel Islands. Famous for its people-first approach, where employees are partners, and providing an outstanding shopper experience, Waitrose has a growing customer base that increased by over 400,000 people in 2024. Its net promoter customer score also rose by six points, indicating a significant improvement in customer loyalty and satisfaction.