Lead UX and conversion designer on Matsmart's mobile redesign — a Swedish sustainable grocery marketplace selling suppliers' surplus stock at a discount, rebuilt and A/B tested with Columbia Road, Futurice and Prototyp.
Matsmart was scaling fast on a simple idea — sell suppliers' surplus stock at a steep discount, and save food from being wasted along the way. The website hadn't kept pace with the business.
New investors, a clear sustainability mission, and strong mobile traffic — but the store behind it all had been built quickly, not built to convert. Buying buttons, product views, filters, sorting and checkout all needed rework, and the team needed a way to keep publishing new content and campaigns without design becoming a bottleneck.
Matsmart brought in Columbia Road to partner alongside Futurice, who had already run service vision sprints to map the pain points, and development agency Prototyp, who were rebuilding the tech stack underneath it.
I led the mobile UX and conversion design — running a structured A/B testing programme rather than shipping one big relaunch and hoping.
We gathered 100 customers in Sweden and 100 in Finland and tested variant after variant of buying buttons, product views, filters, sorting, category display and the logged-in "favourites" state — small tweaks, tested often, rather than a single redesign shipped cold.
The result was a redesigned, mobile-first marketplace: clearer categories and campaign labels, a rebuilt checkout flow, and ready-made templates so the team could keep publishing without waiting on design.
Rebuilt buying buttons, product views, filters, sorting and category display for mobile.
Ran structured tests with 100 customers in Sweden and 100 in Finland.
Rebuilt the checkout flow end to end for a stronger conversion rate.
Ready-made category and campaign templates so the team could publish without design.
Within 12 months of launch, the new design shaped how roughly three million people shopped — most of them on mobile.
"Working with Columbia Road has not just improved our mobile design and increased our conversions, but also given us completely new ways of working." — Johannes Kayser, Head of Business Development, Matsmart
Matsmart has since merged with sister brand Motatos to become Matsmart-Motatos, now trading in five European markets and named to the Financial Times' list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. The mobile UX underneath, though, is still the one built during this project.
