Asherah Allen

UX designer

Grocer-Ease

Grocery Shopping Made Quick and Easy

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!

Step 1: Research

Who are our potential users?

Over 40% of shoppers say they go to more than one store to get all the things they need.

Women are more likely to clip coupons, with 57% of female shoppers collecting them compared to 41% of men.

25% of shoppers say they specifically look for foods that are locally grown or sourced.

Approximately 68% of grocery shoppers say they're solely responsible for doing all the shopping for their family.

Goals

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.

Their thought process while planning their grocery shopping experience
The priorities, concerns, and barriers they run into when planning with other people
Preferred tools they use to plan the decision-making process with travelmates

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:

What do you consider when making your grocery list?
How do you get your groceries? Do they have online shopping/pickup services?
Do you use any rewards or coupon apps? Tell me about your experience with these resources.
Tell me about how you learn about new produce including fruits and vegetables?
What do you enjoy or not enjoy about the grocery shopping experience?
Is buying organic important to you? If yes/no why?
What do you do with the groceries/produce when you get home? Why is that process important to you?

Step 2: Define

Discovered Pain Points

Does not enjoy the aesthetics of grocery store
Busy lifestyle/not enough time to plan
Grocery store layout is confusing and varies from store to store
The business of the grocery store
Does not trust "organic labels
Feels exhausted by the thought of grocery shopping
Does not like the lack of freshness among the produce

Card Sorting

After transcribing interviews, we began a card sorting session, displaying the common themes among the interviewee's responses.

Guiding Questions:

My team engaged in virtual card sorting using Miro collaborative tool
We
What have you learnt about their mental model?
What kind of new navigation structure did you suggest?
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

Step 3: Ideate

I Like, I Wish, What If

Feature Prioritization

Competitor Analysis

Step 4: Prototype

User Flow

Handwritten Sketches

Sketches

Hand sketching the low-fidelity wireframes allowed for

The main purpose of sketching the low-fi wireframe was to brainstorm the structure and design of the Grocer-Ease App.
The interviews influenced the sketches and we wanted to highlight features that would help resolve their pain points, such as:
- creating a shopping list,
- the ability to collaborate and share the shopping list with friends and family
- the ability to check the inventory and status of items/produce in the selected store
- access to recipes and ingredients

Step 5: Analyze

User Testing

Before launching the product, I did a testing round in order to reveal possible usability problems.

Users were asked to complete 5 Tasks

Create a shopping list by recipe
Add pancake ingredients to list
Choose Aldi as your grocery store
Arrange your list by category
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.