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Grocer-Ease
Grocery Shopping Made Quick and Easy
A Mobile App Designed with the efficient grocery shopping experience in mind.
The Project:
Duration: 2 weeks
Tools: Miro, Figma, InVision, Google Suite
Role: UX Designer and Researcher, UI Designer
Context:
Grocery shopping can be stressful and time consuming activity for many people. It is something that we all must do, but how can the process be made more enjoyable and stress-free for grocery shoppers.
Grocer-Ease is a grocery shopping app that helps shoppers plan, collaborate, and stay informed about the quality of produce at their favorite stores!
Methodology:
We took an evaluative approach, conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with participants (n=6), grocery shoppers, about their in-person shopping experiences. Our team used social media and word-of-mouth to recruit participants who were responsible for their household grocery shopping. Ultimately interviewing four (4) women and two (2) men, who grocery shopped (in-person and online) for their households on a regular basis.
Step 1: Research
Who are our potential users?
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Over 40% of shoppers say they go to more than one store to get all the things they need.
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Women are more likely to clip coupons, with 57% of female shoppers collecting them compared to 41% of men.
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25% of shoppers say they specifically look for foods that are locally grown or sourced.
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Approximately 68% of grocery shoppers say they're solely responsible for doing all the shopping for their family.
Goals
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The research goals and objectives listed below helped guide the case study ultimately focusing on helping the potential users have a pleasant experience that made them feel accomplished as a grocery shopper.
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Their thought process while planning their grocery shopping experience.
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The priorities, concerns, and barriers they run into when planning with other people.
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Preferred tools they use to plan the decision-making process with travel mates.
User Interviews
My team members and I conducted semi-structured interviews with potential users to discover how their grocery shopping experience could be more enjoyable and efficient.
Interview Questions Example:
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What do you consider when making your grocery list?
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How do you get your groceries? Do they prefer online shopping/pickup services? why?
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Do you use any rewards or coupon apps? Tell me about your experience with these resources.
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Tell me about how you learn about new produce including fruits and vegetables?
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What do you enjoy or not enjoy about the grocery shopping experience?
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Is buying organic important to you? If yes/no why?
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What do you do with the groceries/produce when you get home? Why is that process important to you?
Discovered Pain Points
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Does not enjoy the aesthetics of grocery store
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Busy lifestyle/not enough time to plan
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Grocery store layout is confusing and varies from store to store
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The business of the grocery store
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Does not trust "organic labels
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Feels exhausted by the thought of grocery shopping
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Does not like the lack of freshness among the produce
Step 2: Define
Card Sorting
After transcribing interviews, we began hybrid card sorting session, displaying the common themes among the interviewee's responses. My team engaged in virtual card sorting using Miro collaborative tool.
Guiding Questions:
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What have you learnt about their mental model?
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What kind of new navigation structure did you suggest?
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What changes did you propose based on the card sorting?
User Persona
Based on the interviews conducted, we set up one personas, which we refer to throughout as we focused on the development of our wireframes
User Insight
The shopper desires to eat healthier, including fresh fruits and vegetables in their regular diet. However, there is so much information that has to be learned. This app focuses on the educating and engaging the users with tips, to-do’s, how-to’s that will encourage and promote ways to select the best produce for the user and use or consume them in a timely manner, reducing waste.
Problem Statement
We believe an educational app for grocery shoppers will help them feel more confident and informed in their decision making process when it comes to purchasing produce. This will make the grocery shopping experience less of a chore and more of an enjoyable experience.
Step 3: Ideate
I like, I wish, What if
Feature Prioritization
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Smart Grocery List
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Crowdsourced Stock & Quality Updates
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Sales and Deals
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Location and Recommended Stores
User Flow
The users’ steps were mapped out to see how their journey could be simplified. Reaching the intended goals of the product smoothly.
Feature Prioritization
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Grocery Gadget
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WhatsInStock
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Grocery Store Apps (Publix, Kroger, etc)
Step 4: prototype
Sketches
Hand sketching the low-fidelity wireframes allowed for opportunity to visualize how the app would look and flow
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The main purpose of sketching the low-fi wireframe was to brainstorm the structure and design of the Grocer-Ease App.
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The interviews influenced the sketches and we wanted to highlight features that would help resolve their pain points, such as:
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creating a shopping list,
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the ability to collaborate and share the shopping list with friends and family
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the ability to check the inventory and status of items/produce in the selected store
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access to recipes and ingredients
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Hi-Fi Wireframes
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Updated the color palette and style guide, making it more vibrant
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Removed the color theory/ mood feature
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Enhanced the shopping experience, ingredient and recipe sharing, events, scheduling, and music
Step 5: analyze
Usability Testing
Before launching the product, I did a testing round in order to reveal possible usability problems.
Users were asked to complete 5 Tasks
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Create a shopping list by recipe
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Add pancake ingredients to list
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Choose Aldi as your grocery store
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Arrange your list by category
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Share the grocery list with a friend
Methodology
7 users participated in virtual prototype testing that included specific tasks that was based on the user flows created.
The participants were asked to join a zoom meeting, given access to the high fidelity prototype, and asked to share their screens as they navigated through the prototype completing the tasks.
Results
Overall, the users provided positive feedback the features and mentioned the enhancements that could have used for improvement, including:
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Creating a profile option
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Ability to collect and save recipes, grocery list, and orders
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Including pricing and local options
Future Possibilities
There are more advance feature that could be added to this design including:
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Instant messaging
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Live video chat
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Grocery item recommendations
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