BigBasket — Shelves
India's online grocery leader needed people to find more than they came for. The answer wasn't a better catalogue — it was to stop showing a catalogue at all, and show shelves.
The shelf, the machine behind it, and the screen that came out of both. Left: the moodboard is photography of real retail — how goods sit on a lit shelf, how a zone reads, how light falls on a rack. Right: the workflow map of the fulfilment operation the app sits on top of — orders splitting by region, picking and zoning at the regional DC, vans to zone hubs, route planning, and the last hundred metres at the customer's door, alongside JIT purchase orders, dark stores, kirana stores and express routes. Below: the concept, with products resting on drawn shelf lines rather than floating in a grid — real brands, real weights, real rupee prices.
–1,500 orders a day, per city — the volume the business case rested on.
audiences named in the brief: working women, shopping husbands, bachelors, elderly.
visual directions taken all the way to concept screens: bright, and pastel / minimal.
pages of brief, moodboard, colour and type exploration behind them.
- Business problem — awareness, shorter slots, and getting people to discover the range
- Target audience — busy lives, heavy bags, already shopping online or willing to try
- Objective — shelves as a connective experience, physical retail carried into digital
- The single most important thing to say — peace of mind
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Write the brief before the moodboard
Business problem, target audience, objective, and the one thing the brand most needed to say — each on its own page, agreed before any image was chosen. “Peace of mind” — the relief of not having to step out of the door — became the line everything else had to serve.
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Research said grocery is a chore
The findings that shaped direction: grocery shopping is a chore that has to be made interesting; families treat it as a group exercise rather than an individual one; stocking and refilling is a stress point; and price opacity breaks trust before anything else does.
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Map the machine behind the app
We mapped the fulfilment operation the interface sits on: orders splitting by region at the server, picking and zoning at the regional DC, vans to zone hubs, route planning, and the last hundred metres — contact the customer, wait while they check the products, collect the pin and the rating. Alongside it the alternates: JIT purchase orders to vendors, dark stores, kirana stores, express and tier-2 routes, and every point where customer care gets pulled in. Discovery in the app is only a promise the operation behind it can keep.
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Name the idea: shelves
Not a catalogue of products but a store of endless shelves — infinite visibility into what sits under each one, and shelves the user fills themselves. It gave discovery somewhere to live in the interface instead of arriving as a promotion bolted on top.
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Source the direction from the shop, not the app store
Every reference in the moodboard is a photograph of real retail — themed racks, graphic cut-outs on shelf fronts, ambient white light with yellow metal, zoned areas. Direction pulled from how a shelf actually reads to someone standing in front of it.
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Treat colour as appetite, not decoration
The second moodboard set worked on how colour changes the perception of food — which colours excite an appetite and which suppress it, and how colour strength shifts shopping behaviour. Colour as a reason to buy, and as the thing that builds recognition over time.
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Take two directions far enough to choose between
Bright, with colour-banded shelf rows, and pastel / minimal, with products resting on drawn shelf lines. Both were built with real brands, weights and rupee prices — a visual direction judged on placeholder content is judged on nothing.
“Look at SHELVES as a connective experience that combines the best of physical into digital… which allows users to have infinite visibility into product choice under each shelf, and shop with endless shelves.”Creative brief · October 2015
The direction was signed off and carried through to a released product. What the exploration handed over was more than a look: a written brief with a defensible line at the centre of it, a colour rationale grounded in how people respond to food, a type direction, and two concepts developed far enough that choosing between them was a real decision rather than a preference.
Peace of mind, not convenience
Convenience is what every grocery app claims. The brief committed to something more human — the relief of not having to go — and the tone followed from it: warm, caring, comforting, upbeat, personal, confident.
Reference the thing you're replacing
Designing an online store by looking at other online stores produces a me-too. Looking at the physical shop gives you something to translate — and the shelf turned out to be the translatable idea.
Two directions, stocked and priced
Both concepts carried real brands, real weights and real rupee prices. The density of an actual Indian grocery basket is the test a direction has to survive — placeholder content hides exactly the problems worth finding.