Designer Reimagines What Our Shopping Receipt Should Look Like

We’ve all received receipts in our life, whether it be the receipt at the restaurant we just ate, receipts for the gadget we just purchased, or receipts from the grocery store. However, the problem with most receipts is that they’re hard to read. This is usually because a lot of them are printed on small sheets of paper, and sometimes the font can be faded or squashed.

For receipts that contain a couple of items, it’s not too tricky, but for longer receipts like when you’re buying groceries, that’s where it gets tricky. However, designer Susie Lu thinks that she might have the answer to a better-designed receipt, which is why including graphics that acts as an infograph of sorts on your purchases.

As you can see in the photo above, a receipt at the grocery store can be reimagined by including some diagrams that shows the type of purchases you made, where food items are broken down into categories like “produce”, “eggs & dairy”, “meat & seafood”, and so on. According to Lu, “I was compelled to think of ways that data visualization could be used to redesign everyday experiences. Of the use cases I had brainstormed, the receipt was the idea I was most excited to play with first.”

This data visualization helps customers better track what they’ve purchased, but we imagine it could help with understanding what we spend our money on. For example, if you realize that you spend the bulk of your grocery money on snacks, you could try to scale it back. Lu adds, “I found it [most] useful to understand by category how I spent my money. I would be interested in seeing this over multiple grocery trips to see how the trend changed week over week.”

That being said, this is currently a concept design and whether or not retailers and supermarkets adopt this remains to be seen.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Design, General
Tags: f&b