Where does Loblaws lose its customers?
We ran a usability study on Loblaws.ca with 8 shoppers across 4 everyday tasks: browsing, finding deals, reviewing the cart, and checking out. Six made it through. Two couldn't, even after several minutes of trying. This case study covers what stopped them and what would fix it.
Industry
Grocery / eCommerce
Platforms
Desktop Web
Timeline
2.5 weeks, April 2026
Team
4 UX Researchers
8
Participants across 8 remote sessions
4
Tasks covering the full shopping trip
75%
Checkout completion
rate
14
Issues found and
rated by severity
01 — The challenge
Online grocery shopping is the norm now. How well does Loblaws.ca support it?
Loblaws is one of Canada’s biggest grocery retailers, and more shopping now starts online before anyone walks into a store. We wanted to know how well Loblaws.ca holds up. So we audited it ourselves, then tested it with 8 real shoppers across 4 everyday tasks.
01
Browse & Add Items
02
Find a Deal
03
Review Your Cart
04
Continue Checkout
02 — HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Before testing with real shoppers, we audited the site ourselves
Before bringing in real users, we audited the site ourselves against established usability heuristics, rating each issue High, Medium, or Low. Almost everything came back High, and most of it traced back to one theme: the site doesn’t tell users what’s happening or what to do next. Here’s what stood out.
01 — USABILITY TESTING
Then we tested it with real shoppers
To see how these issues played out for real people, we ran moderated usability sessions with 8 participants. Each session ran about 45 minutes, remote over Microsoft Teams, with a moderator guiding the session and a note taker recording observations.
Browse & Add Items
Slow load times, cluttered cards, filter gaps
6.25/7
~5.2 min · 8/8 completed
Find a Deal
Inconsistent labels, "Weekly Features" hard to find
4.88/7
~3.2 min · 8/8 completed
Review Your Cart
$30 minimum hidden, recommendations obscured cart
5.94/7
~4.1 min · 8/8 completed
Continue to Checkout
Cart resets at login, unclear steps, location confusion
4.44/7
~7.25 min · 6/8 completed
02 — WHAT WE TESTED
The closer to payment, the worse it got.
We focused on four tasks that covered the full journey: browsing and adding items, finding deals, reviewing the cart, and continuing to checkout. Sessions ran ~30 minutes each, moderated remotely via Microsoft Teams with a dedicated note-taker in each session.
Findings were synthesised through affinity mapping in FigJam, then rated by severity based on frequency and impact.
01
Browse & Add Items
Slow load times, cluttered cards, filter gaps
6.25/7
~5.2 min · 8/8 completed
02
Find a Deal
Inconsistent labels, "Weekly Features" hard to find
4.88/7
~3.2 min · 8/8 completed
03
Review Your Cart
$30 minimum hidden, recommendations obscured cart
5.94/7
~4.1 min · 8/8 completed
04
Continue to Checkout
Cart resets at login, unclear steps, location confusion
4.44/7
~7.25 min · 6/8 completed
03 — WHAT WE FOUND
Six friction points that broke the experience — and trust.
HIGH SEVERITY
The $30 minimum was a surprise at the worst moment
Disclosed only at cart review, after users had spent significant time browsing. Participants were forced to backtrack and add unwanted items just to proceed.
Multiple participants blocked from proceeding
HIGH SEVERITY
Logging in wiped the cart
Cart state was inconsistent across sessions. Items disappeared or merged with previous orders. The cart icon vanished in certain states, leaving users hunting for their order.
5 of 8 participants affected
HIGH SEVERITY
Nobody knew which step came next
Checkout had no visible progress indicator. "Save & Continue" had to be clicked twice with no explanation. Users were told to "complete steps to proceed" without knowing what those steps were.
6 of 8 participants affected
HIGH SEVERITY
Store selection confused everyone
The default location didn't match users' actual location. Pickup and delivery modes were visually indistinguishable. Repeated location prompts kept interrupting the flow mid-checkout.
7 of 8 participants affected
HIGH SEVERITY
The site felt like it was fighting the user
Pages took 5–7 seconds to reload during cart updates. Unexpected refreshes reset scroll position. One participant: "It's like doing the groceries twice."
Affected every session
MEDIUM SEVERITY
Recommendations hid the actual cart
Promotional items appeared at the top of the cart page — above actual cart contents. The "Items you might like" label masked what was essentially an ad carousel.
6 of 8 participants affected
"What am I missing? It says complete steps to proceed. But what steps?"
— Participant 8, during the checkout task
04 — WHAT WE RECOMMENDED
Fix what's blocking checkout first — then address the foundation.
01
Show the $30 minimum from the start
A persistent "spend $X more" indicator during browsing and in the cart. Disable checkout only when the threshold isn't met — with a clear, visible reason why.
02
Preserve the cart across login
Merge anonymous and authenticated carts. Keep the cart icon persistent at all times. Offer guest checkout to remove account creation as a blocker.
03
Make checkout steps visible
Add a numbered progress indicator. Show what's complete and what remains. Provide inline feedback when a step must be saved before the next one unlocks.
04
Auto-detect location, simplify pickup
Default to the nearest store on first visit. Give pickup and delivery visually distinct active states. Cut repeated location prompts to a single moment at the start of checkout.
05
Let the cart be a cart
Move promotional recommendations below the subtotal. Show actual cart items on first scroll. Fix the broken substitution selector and surface error messages when interactions fail.
06
The real fix is the technology stack
Slow loads, unexpected refreshes, unresponsive clicks — these are infrastructure problems. Design improvements will help at the margins. A platform rebuild is what resolves the root cause.
05 — WHAT I LEARNED
Running this study changed how I think about research.
Completion rate is the least useful metric on its own
Every participant completed tasks 1–3. But the time, hesitation, and frustration we observed told a completely different story. Completion is the floor, not the ceiling.
UX problems aren't always UX problems
The biggest pain points in this study weren't caused by bad design decisions, they were caused by a slow, unstable platform. Knowing when to escalate beyond design is a skill.
Affinity mapping is only as good as your notes
Sessions where the note-taker captured direct quotes versus paraphrases produced dramatically richer synthesis. The quality of observation shapes everything downstream.
Severity ratings need to be ruthless
Early drafts had too many "high severity" issues. Forcing triage, what would you fix first if you had one sprint, sharpened the recommendations into something actually actionable.
06 — CONCLUSION
Good enough isn't good enough, especially at the moment of purchase.
This study showed that Loblaws' desktop experience is functional but only barely, and only for persistent users. The friction wasn't random. It clustered around the highest-stakes moments: logging in, reaching the cart, moving through checkout. Those are exactly the moments a retailer can't afford to lose people.
Many of the issues we found weren't design mistakes, they were symptoms of an aging platform being stretched past its limits. That distinction matters. It means the fix isn't a new button colour or a reorganised nav. It's an infrastructure investment that unlocks every design improvement downstream.
If this study did one thing, it made that case with evidence, not assumptions.