Grocery shopping shapes our health, finances, habits, and even identities. And yet, for many, it feels like a chore. Self-checkout, contactless payment, and delivery services are a big help, but these features simply expedite an already burdensome activity. Shoppers don’t want to have to choose between doing it quickly or doing it well because, more often than not, we are forced to do it quickly.
From these insights I developed my point of view
Unseen
Hurdles
My initial observational study didn’t yield much result, as I couldn’t see the part of the user journey that took place outside of the store, when people plan their shopping around commitments, family, health. To better capture pain points as they arose I conducted a 2-week diary study with 6 participants, from which I extracted some common needs among shoppers:
Grocery shopping should be easy to integrate with our values and priorities, and never at odds with them.
While existing solutions do address some of the pain points I found in my research, none manage to offer a holistic systematisation of the entire grocery shopping experience.
A grocery assistant that automates in-store shopping by finding the best route through the aisles, and allowing shoppers to curate a collection of recipes and products composable into smart lists for specific needs or occasions.
I then turned this into a physical prototype for some Wizard of Oz testing.
Mindfulness
Integration
Automation
This project brought to mind the image of buffets and their functional elegance. We like independence, and we like just enough guidance to be able to comfortably pursue what we need.
With this rationale I sketched out YumYam's first iteration, an on-board assistant to integrate with shopping trolleys.
First time users must set up their account while at the shop, obstructing the aisles with their trolley.
The need to lift heavy items up to the barcode compromises the product's accessibility.
The upfront costs and infrastructural burdens associated with the tech will discourage franchises from onboarding.
The smart trolleys would be delicate and subject to frequent maintenance.
The on-board device would make the trolleys difficult to stack.
The easiest solution was to eliminate the hardware altogether and make YumYam! a mobile app. This better aligned with both my principles of mindfulness and integration, as shoppers could access the platform whenever they liked, and customise their shopping experience outside of the chaotic setting of the shop.
Some fatal flaws came to light while testing the prototype in actual shops:
Unmoderated, 10-15 minutes.
UK, remote.
4 shoppers aged 23 to 54.
Fine-tune the transition between the grocery planning flow and the in-store shopping flow.
The first iteration of YumYam! performed poorly in usability testing. A heuristic evaluation from two other designers helped me iron out some interactions, but the core issue was at the UI level.
UX blunders or: how not to reinvent the wheel
Any designer’s first few works are embarrassing. But if they went the skeuomorphic route they can be really embarrassing. Lately I’ve been trying to rescue one such design for my UCSD HCI Capstone Project —It’s been a rough couple weeks.
I chronicled YumYam!’s complete redesign in a humorous blog post:
A Different Way Of Shopping
1. Some pain points go beyond user journeys
Universal, essential activities like grocery shopping can become so routine that pain points get inextricably tied to the experience itself. Research methods that help us find what people want, might not have the reach to let us see what people need. Sometimes it’s worth stepping back and forgetting what the problem is altogether, to try and document an experience for what it really is.
2. Don’t waste participants on premature tests
Any prototype is flawed by definition, but many first-iteration flaws are often oversights and inconsistencies that result from the messy process of ideation. Even though I felt confident about my design, I still decided to subject it to a preliminary test with two designer colleagues, thinking they’d find two or three problems… in their heuristic evaluation they found over a dozen violations! Going directly into user testing would have been a huge waste of time for everyone involved.
1. Nutritional tracking
This feature was present in my initial prototype, but ended up not being prioritised in development. I’d like to flesh it out in future versions to allow shoppers to better monitor how the foods they’re buying align with their health and fitness goals. This could take the form of a simple macronutrient breakdown of a shopper’s trolley content, lists, and recipes, as well as smart suggestions based on that.
2. Recurring purchases
A lite version of this feature is present in the current design, in which a list or recipe will exclude products that have recently been bought by the shopper and should still be in their pantry. The algorithm could be further refined to suggest a product purchase after an estimated consumption period.
3. Floor map
The app’s core feature of quick aisle navigation would be enhanced by the presence of an interactive floor map of the shop. Such addition was beyond the scope of the initial design because of its upfront requirements, but would be a no-brainer as a future update.
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