Client
Staples Canada
Period
July 2023 – February 2024
Setup
Consultancy-led project.
Team included a Product Owner from Staples and a development team in Serbia: 1 frontend developer and 2 backend developers working on Scandit SDK integration and AS400 connectivity.
My role
UX / product design, research, process mapping, information architecture, prototype design, concept expansion
Tech
Scandit mobile scanning SDK, AS400 legacy systems
Staples approached the consultancy with a concrete operational problem: incorrect printed shelf price tags in stores. Prices changed frequently due to discounts, promotions, and other fluctuations, but updating the physical labels reliably was still difficult. When a shelf tag was wrong, the store had to honor the displayed price, creating friction and cost across the value chain.
What looked like a narrow scanning use case turned out to be much more than that. Through remote research with a pilot store in Toronto, I found that the real challenge was not just detecting wrong labels, but designing within a much larger ecosystem of legacy tools, store routines, weak training, and operational workarounds. My role became less about polishing a feature and more about grounding the product in reality: mapping flows, aligning the team on what the product actually needed to do, and shaping a coherent employee-facing tool around the work associates were already doing.
Staples stores relied on printed price tags placed next to products on shelves and displays. Those tags changed regularly, but the update process was error-prone. Sometimes the wrong label stayed up because of manual mistakes, process gaps, or system issues. In a store with long aisles and thousands of products, finding those mismatches was already difficult. Fixing them added another chain of work: identifying the wrong tags, printing replacements, and physically walking back to replace them.
Before the pilot solution, associates had to validate prices through a combination of printed price lists and a clunky AS400-based handheld scanner. At best, the scanner showed the “correct” price. The actual comparison still had to be done manually against the shelf tag. The result was slow, awkward, and easy to get wrong.