We started from a broad brief, how can cities and their inhabitants adapt to the effects of climate change?, and narrowed it to something tangible: single-use plastic in everyday grocery shopping. The numbers framed the urgency: a huge share of the world's plastic goes into food and product packaging, and millions of tonnes end up in the ocean every year. Bulk (zero-waste) shopping already exists as an answer, but in practice it's inconvenient, often expensive, and hard to fit into a busy life so the people who'd most like to reduce their waste give up and default back to plastic-wrapped supermarket runs.
The solution
aPeso: a bulk-buying pick-up service that redefines how people shop package-free, built to make zero-waste convenient, fair-priced, and genuinely accessible. Users order the exact quantities they need online or in a small neighborhood store, then pick up their order ready to go. Every container is sustainable and designed to be returned and reused, running on a relationship of mutual trust, and inspired by the old-market bond between buyer and seller. The service spans a mobile app, the physical store experience, reusable packaging, a returns-based loyalty system, and even a smart weighing scale that lets customers verify their order.
Timeline
Dec 2023 – Feb 2024 (Master’s group project, UDIT)
The team
Cala Largacha – UX/UI Designer
Jhendí Pineda
Víctor Vega
Maialen Bastos
Astrid Bencosme
Alba Gismero
Six-person design team
Project timeline
Dec 2023
Secondary research on climate change and mapping of opportunity areas.
Jan 2024
Brainstorming and clustering to converge on the problem; concept, value proposition, and service mapping (journey, sitemap, flowchart).
Feb 2024
Full system design: visual identity, design system, app prototype, product catalog, loyalty system, and physical experience.
aPeso — key screens.
How might we make package-free shopping convenient, trustworthy, and accessible for everyday life?
aPeso turns a broad climate challenge into a connected service across digital and physical touchpoints, making sustainable shopping practical rather than aspirational.
🏢 Business problem
Existing bulk shopping struggles to compete with supermarkets on convenience, price, and accessibility, despite growing demand for lower-waste alternatives.
👤 User problem
People who want to reduce plastic waste often abandon bulk shopping because it takes too much time, costs more, and does not fit easily into everyday routines.
Package-free shopping is inconvenientA connected bulk-buying service
🎯 My role
I participated in the research and ideation phases and took responsibility for the UX/UI design. I created wireframes, prototypes, and the design system to ensure usability and consistency across the app. My focus was to make sustainability easy, trustworthy, and convenient for everyday users.
•Research and ideation with a six-person design team
•Wireframes and prototypes for the app’s core flows
•Design system for usability and visual consistency
•UX/UI design across the digital service
User research
Cross-referencing a broad climate landscape
Each team member gathered secondary research independently — climate causes and consequences, mitigation initiatives worldwide, and how different industries and countries are planning toward long-term sustainability — and we then cross-referenced everything to find where the strongest opportunities lay. That contrast is what surfaced packaging and everyday consumption as the sharpest, most actionable problem, and it grounded the whole project in the wider climate context rather than jumping straight to an app idea.
aPeso field research boardDrop image here
Journey map
Concept and journey
Once we'd reframed the problem around the zero-waste 5 Rs, we defined who we were designing for — people living alone, small families, and time-strapped shoppers — and built out the concept through a moodboard, a scenario, and a storyboard following Violeta, a busy student who discovers aPeso. We mapped her full journey across five stages, from awareness through consideration, decision, purchase, and retention, surfacing the pains at each step (too much time, too much plastic, prices too high at specialty bulk stores) and the opportunities to design against them. That journey drove the sitemap and flowcharts for both the digital app and the physical store.
aPeso service journey mapDrop image here
Design + iterations
One system across digital and physical touchpoints
I helped build aPeso's design system and visual identity — a warm palette, Inria Sans type, an 8px grid, and a full component and icon library — and applied it across the app's core flows: onboarding, product browsing with adjustable quantities, scheduling a pick-up, the returnable-container calculation, and the points wallet. In parallel we iterated on the physical side: through several rounds we refined two container types (a food-safe RPET bag for solids with a rewritable RFID product tag, and a reusable vessel for liquids), a three-zone store layout with a transparent partition to reinforce trust, and a self-service weighing scale that auto-identifies products via RFID so customers can verify their order — the digital echo of a traditional market's trust ritual.
aPeso design system, app flows, packaging, and physical store experienceDrop image here
Outcomes and impact
aPeso delivered a complete, cohesive service concept that makes zero-waste shopping practical rather than aspirational, connecting a mobile app, reusable packaging, a returns-based loyalty wallet, neighborhood pick-up stores, and a verification scale into one seamless experience. As a group master's project, it pushed me to design a system that had to hold together across digital and physical touchpoints at once, and to keep a single, trustworthy experience coherent across every one of them.
What I learned
I learned how much stronger a definition gets when a team researches independently and then contrasts findings — the cross-referencing is what turned a huge, abstract brief (climate change) into a sharp, designable problem (plastic in everyday shopping). I learned to design for trust as an explicit feature, not an afterthought — the returnable containers, the transparent store partition, and the verification scale all exist to make trust tangible. And designing across digital and physical at the same time taught me to think in whole services, not just screens: every touchpoint had to carry the same promise.
Want the full walkthrough?
Happy to walk you through the research, the iterations and the final screens in detail.
