Lowe's RoundUp for Charity — Self-Checkout UX Research
Led competitive analysis across 12 retailers to identify UX improvements to Lowe's self-checkout donation flow, targeting a 10-second reduction in transaction time while increasing donation conversion.
Why this page is a summary: this work is covered by an NDA, so the artifacts — screens, research captures, and prototypes — are not public. What follows is the problem, how I worked it, and the decisions I made, which is the part that transfers anyway. The full case study is available on request, or behind the password below if you already have it.
The Problem
Lowe's added a charity round-up prompt to self-checkout during a pandemic coin shortage. It worked — it raised a meaningful amount for charity every year and was expanded from cash to cards. But every additional prompt costs time at a terminal where time is the whole product, and checkout had gotten measurably slower. The brief was to cut that friction without cutting donations, which are not obviously compatible goals.
What I Did
The work behind the wall.
Evaluated 12 direct and indirect retail competitors for how charity donations are handled at checkout
Went through each competitor's checkout in person with a GoPro chest rig, capturing the real screens and the real sequence
Synthesized the captures into six recommendations, then prioritized the four with the best effort-to-impact ratio
Presented findings and before/after recommendations to the Enterprise UX Selling team
Decisions
The calls I made, and why.
The screens are confidential. The reasoning is not, and it is the part worth reading.
I went and stood in the checkout lines
Screenshots and secondary research would not have told me what I needed — where in the sequence the prompt appears, how long it holds you, what you are being asked to decide while a queue forms behind you. A chest-mounted camera through a real transaction captured the timing and the order of operations, which is where the actual problem turned out to live.
When the sample was thin, I said so and widened it
Only three of the twelve retailers — Lowe's included — had both self-checkout and a donation prompt. Rather than draw confident conclusions from a sample of three, I pulled in assisted-checkout experiences to round out the pattern analysis and was explicit with the team about which findings rested on which evidence.
The fix was placement, not persuasion
The instinct in the room was to make the ask more compelling. What the competitor analysis showed was that the prompt was in the wrong place in the sequence — most retailers ask immediately after the cart phase, before payment, and customers arrive at the terminal already expecting that rhythm. Moving the prompt to where people expect it costs no time and no goodwill, which is a cheaper win than a better-written ask.
Tell people where the money goes
Prompts naming a specific charity, with its logo, consistently outperformed generic appeals. A person deciding in roughly five seconds cannot evaluate an abstraction — the logo does the work that a sentence of copy cannot do in the time available.
What's in the full case study
The competitor screen captures, the timing analysis, the full set of six recommendations, and the screen-by-screen before/after redesign of the Lowe's prompt.