This is a three-week UX course project, the goal of which was to improve the in-store shopping experience of a local grocery store, Fresh City Market. This project took us around 40 hours, including time for the team meetings and user studies. In these 40 hours, we did:
Like most modern urban grocery markets, Fresh City Market was located at the center of a populated neighborhood (Purdue University), and have the advantage of being convenient to shoppers around it. However, frustrations may still occur to shoppers because of its small selection of products and its limited ability to restock certain items promptly. Shoppers are usually left confused and spend extra time to find items that may not be even carried by the store. Oftentimes, they end up buying things they did not intend to buy initially, causing shoppers to waste their time and money. In this project, our main goal was to relieve customers' frustration when certain items were sold out.
To better understand the customers of Fresh City Market (Fresh, for short), we planned to use both interview and in-store observation. The goal of the interview was to understand typical customers’ shopping habits and frustrations. Main questions we prepared included:
( These interview questions were semi-structured. We often come up with follow-up questions based on participants’ answers during the interview. )
To further investigate how do customers shop at Fresh, we found that observation could be a good choice. We adopted the “fly-on-the-wall” method which means we have no interaction with customers when we observe them. We planned to take notes about:
We recruited 5 participants who were all regular customers of Fresh, including 4 male and 1 female. Four of them were undergraduate or graduate students of Purdue University (because the store is close to Purdue campus, students are the store's main customers. ), and the last one is an engineer living around the campus. All of them are in their 20s and shop several times a week at Fresh and other larger stores like Walmart. Each interview lasted about 15-20 minutes. We have taken notes during the interview.
We went to the store twice during its peak time (5:00 – 7:00 pm, weekdays) to observe customers. In total, we observed five customers. We started to observe them right after they came into the store and took notes on our mobile phones. It was interesting to find out that some people have clear targets, while some people spent more time wondering around; some people like healthy food, while some prefer fast foods.
In addition to observing customer’s shopping habit, we also paid attention to the layout of the store, the position of different kinds of foods and groceries, and how fresh their product actually was. Also, we talked to one of their employees to know more about the store such as when they usually restock.
We adopted the affinity diagram to analyze the data we collected from both interview and observation. The notes were categories into following groups:
We divided our findings into two groups, the first was about the store, and the second was about customers. For the store, we found that the advantages of Fresh included: near campus, nice environment, nice eating place, friendly cashier, and exclusive items. Problems or disadvantages included:
For the customers, we found that they were mostly quick at shopping, spending around 10 minutes in the store. Most customers are young students, and they don’t usually buy too many stuff in the store. Fresh fruits and vegetables, deli, and non-perishable food are the most popular items. However, people do complain that fresh fruits and vegetable always sell fast and can usually go out-of-stock.
We found many problems in our user research, however, we realized that most problems cannot be fundamentally solved by us — several student designers who have no access to the internal information of that store. For example, a few users mentioned that the vegetable and fruits were not fresh often, although this store emphasized fresh food in its branding. We cannot solve this problem fundamentally from a designer’s side. What we can do, probably, is to relieve the frustration of customers.
Among all the problems we found, one problem was mentioned often by customers that many foods are sold out often, and it’s frustrating if they came to the store but only find out the item they want was sold out.
Therefore, we made our problem statement:
It happens often that customers feel frustrated when they cannot obtain what they want due to the limited amount of goods.
Based on our user research, we created two personas. The first persona represents the customers who prefer healthy food. They often buy fresh vegetables and fruits at Fresh, and they care about the nutrition information of a product. The second persona represents the customers who like fast foods such as can food. They went to Fresh because it’s close to the campus, and they can grab some foods very fast. They usually don’t cook.
Based on our research, persona and the problem we want to solve, we built a user journey map. It’s a story about a shopping journey of Katherine. She wanted to buy some yogurt at Fresh, but she failed to find the brand she wanted to buy. The journey map was very helpful for us to find design opportunity at a specific point. User journey map spreads out the whole experience of a product or a service in chronological order, which make it clear to discover which part is problematic.
After setting up our user models, we started to brainstorm solutions. There were three ideas we liked most:
1. Magic Recipe -- imaging that one day you wanted to cook some broccoli beef, but when you arrived at the store, you found that broccoli was sold out. All of a sudden, you had no idea what to cook. Then there’s a magic machine which gave you some beef recipes and also told you where to find the ingredients in the store. You found beef with mushroom also works for you. Therefore, you grabbed some beef and mushroom happily at the end.
2. The second idea was a feature allowing customers to post and vote products they want the store to introduce. This feature was designed based on the problem that for a mid-size grocery store like Fresh, it’s hard to have a lot of brands to choose from for a single kind of product like yogurt. With this feature, the store can directly know what the customers want most. Introducing these most wanted products could be profitable for the store because a lot of customers will buy them. We liked this feature but it's not focused on our main problem.
3. The last idea is more direct – providing customers the stock information. This feature allows customers to know whether the item they want is in stock or not. If the product is out of stock, the customer can choose to not to go to the store that day. The feature would also provide the next restock time, and a shopping list for customers to check the availability of the items they frequently buy.
Each of our ideas had pros and cons. We felt very excited about the first idea, however, that one seems not very feasible – to build that service, we need to create or find a large number of recipes, what’s more, the ingredients of these recipes should be found at the store. The second one was also good, but it couldn’t solve the main problem we want to solve. The third one may solve the problem to some extent, but the way it solves the problem didn't address the in-store shopping experience part. What if the customers don't use the app or didn't check the stock information in advance?
To comprehensively address our problem, we add another feature for the in-store part: We planned to put a cute doll on the shelf where some item was sold out, with a tag inviting customers to scan the code on it and get a coupon of similar items. In this way, we may be able to relieve the frustration of a customer. I used “before and after” user journey map to represent our final solution.
The platform we chose to build this feature was mobile. The main reason was that the mobile app would be more convenient for customers to access. Also, it's better to build this feature based on an online shopping system. We found that this store did have an online shopping website which provided online shopping and delivering service. Therefore, building a mobile version wouldn’t cost too much.
Based on our idea, we designed the features and information we wanted to provide in detail by prototyping. In addition to providing stock information and coupon code in-store, we also designed the second idea, product suggestion, in the app to find if users will like it.
To test if our idea works for the customers of Fresh, we tested our paper prototype with 3 Fresh customers right after we created it. Our user testing included two tasks:
For the screens that were not involved in the two tasks above, we simply asked them for their opinions, these screens include:
Generally, participants thought this idea was good. The only concern was its feasibility — the store may not be able to provide their stock in time. The other feedback included:
After the paper prototype testing, we improved our prototype and started to do visual design. We chose green as the primary color to give a sense of fresh.
After visual design, we decided to use heuristic evaluation to eliminate more problems. Our team sat down together and picked ten heuristics from the classic Nielson’s (1995) 10 usability heuristics and Cooper’s visual and interaction principles. The heuristic evaluation was conducted internally.
In this project, we designed several features to address the problem that customers usually feel frustrated when they failed to get what they want due to the item was sold out. These features aimed to relieve customers’ frustration so as to improve the overall shopping experience. The problem was a small one, but a hard one to fundamentally solve. We made effort to find solutions to address the problem rather than came up with some “interesting” idea irrelevant to the result of our user research. In our ideation day, we spent a whole day sitting together in a library trying to find the best solution. We struggled a lot since most problems we found seemed to be beyond our scope.
Our solution may have some flaws because we lack the business background to deeper understand the “out-of-stock” problem and judge whether our solution would be feasible. But I did enjoy the process we conducted this project, especially the ideation part.
