ShopSavvy’s main focus has been on helping users save money by enabling them to scan bar codes on products to find out how much they cost at nearby retailers and online. With the redesign, the company is also now entering into the larger product discovery space to take advantage of how users are engaging with mobile for shopping purposes.

“The redesign came about because we had a lot of users who were using our application for what we call direct research, when they would scan a bar code or enter in a product name and were directly searching for a particular product,” said John Boyd, CEO and cofounder of ShopSavvy, San Francisco.

“But we also had a lot of users who were really interested in just basic product discovery,” he said. “While we could do a little bit of that with the old format, we really needed a design that allowed us to surface beautiful products and products that were going to be interesting to our users in a simplified way.”

Faster-loading images
The new version of the app features completely redesigned navigation, easier list creation as well as a new look and feel. It also has enhanced exploratory features to find top products within the ShopSavvy community on both the iPhone and iPad.

When shoppers open up the app, they will see a new discovery panel on the left that enables them to browse through trending top products in a variety of categories.

On the right, they will be able to conduct a direct search and narrow down on a specific product search they are interested in.

Users who are not ready to buy right away can tap on a product and allocate it to a list for later reference.

The app has also been tweaked so that images load about 80 percent faster than they were before since consumers tend to want to breeze through a lot of products when they are exploring.

“We are finding that people in mobile context respond very well to high-quality, fast-loading images,” Mr. Boyd said.

Non-UPC products
For the first time, ShopSavvy will also include products that do not have a bar code. 

Users can also now create, view and update lists by swiping from screen to screen and dragging and dropping products into the lists.

Additionally, the app now features larger, more prominent and higher-resolution product images to make browsing easier.

The ShopSavvy app has more than 40 million downloads and millions of monthly active users. 

“More and more people are using mobile applications to research products, search for products when they are actually in the retail environment,” Mr. Boyd said. “They are really expecting as much information as possible when they are in that retail experience or whether they are researching at home on the tablet.”

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York