The Team
Christian Mtima: Product Designer
James : Tech Lead
Paul: Senior Product Manager
Arty: Senior Front End Developer (Android)
Challenge
In busy stores, customers often face long queues at the tills — and many just leave. In fact, 1 in 5 shoppers will walk away without buying anything if the line is too long. That means stores are losing money, especially during peak times like weekends and sales.
Solution
We wanted to see if giving staff a mobile payment device they could carry on the shop floor would make a difference. Instead of sending customers to wait in line, staff could take payments on the spot — near fitting rooms, at displays, or even beside the tills.
We ran a short, low-risk trial in 5 to 10 stores, separate from the main till system. The devices could:
•Accept card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay
•Handle sale items and single-item offers
•Send digital receipts
We kept things simple: no cash, staff discounts, gift cards, or complex promotions. The idea was to test the basics and see if it worked — with minimal impact on daily store operations.
Results
Each store sees around 1,000 customers a day — and when queues are long, 5–10% of shoppers walk away without buying anything. That’s up to 100 lost sales a day, per store.
By letting staff take payments anywhere on the shop floor, the mobile POS devices helped recover some of those lost sales — potentially adding £500–£1,000 in extra revenue per store, per day. Scaled across 10 stores, that’s up to £10,000 extra per day, or £3.6 million a year if used across all locations.
The trial gave us clear insights into how mobile payments can reduce queue abandonment and improve the shopping experience. These results are now shaping the business case for a wider rollout.
Competitor analysis
Prototype journey
This was a standard prototype initially built by the tech engineer without fully considering the end-to-end (E2E) user journey. I joined New Look partway through the project and worked on developing and refining a variety of user journeys. This involved making several store visits to gather feedback from colleagues, which I then used to improve the Figma prototype that I had started building.
Refinements of journey
Due to the constraints of this trial project, a range of use cases needed to be considered and tested with store colleagues. There were many stakeholders involved, and security was a significant concern for them. For this mobile payment solution to be viable, the device was designed to have only one function: processing payments. Features like overrides or returns were excluded, and customers requiring those services would be directed to the tills. As a result, these scope limitations had to be carefully reflected in the UI design.
Colleague feedback
The feedback from store visits and colleagues was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone supported the "queue busting" proposition, believing it would greatly assist during busy store hours. Additionally, it was valuable to uncover different use cases that hadn’t been initially considered, ensuring they were addressed as much as possible in the solution.
Build spec
One of the challenges of this project was managing the variety of stakeholders and navigating the approval processes for the proposition. Initially, we started with an HHT device, but getting approval to build an app for it became a major hurdle. As a result, we switched to using the S700 Stripe device. This required me to update the designs to accommodate the new hardware, such as using the camera for scanning products. Since Android devices lack a back button, I also had to incorporate a back button into every interaction. Overall, the S700 device is more appealing and supports a wider range of payment methods, including chip and pin, and swipe, in addition to the contactless payments that both devices offered.
