A Gap in the Grocery Industry
Online Grocery shopping is forecasted to become a $29.7B industry by 2021. Busy Professionals find it difficult to efficiently keep up healthy eating habits and shopping for groceries while keeping up with their busy schedules. They crave a balance between their busy lives and their dietary preferences. With this opportunity in mind, Orchard is a no brick-and-mortar grocery delivery concept that will connect busy professionals and people with fresh groceries.
My role was to take Orchard from concept to prototype.
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Design Lead
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12 weeks
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Orchard (Renamed when shipped)
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Product Owner, Visual Designer, Junior UX Designer, UX Researcher
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM SPACE
Busy professionals need a grocery shopping experience that is timely and incorporates several dietary options because they have limited time to shop, and think through what foods to prepare with the groceries bought.
Research & Findings
DOMAIN RESEARCH
The online grocery shopping industry has several large players like Instacart and Thrive Market. Other brick-and-mortar grocery stores such as Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Target are also powerful players in the market. Currently, Amazon is the number one online seller of groceries.
USER INTERVIEWS
Online surveys were sent to collect quantitative data on user grocery shopping behaviors, brand engagements, and online shopping habits. 35 responses were collected from users between 19 - 38 years.
Understanding the Consumer
For a more universal product such as a grocery shopping application that doesn’t target a specific audience, there was a need to capture the preferences of a wider audience. As such, instead of a single persona, four strong typical personas that captured the various characteristics of users that were interviewed for this project were created. The personas were truly representative of the larger group of grocery shoppers.
Meet “The Busy Mid-Career Mom”, “The Entry-Level Professional”, “The Grad Student”, and “The Tech Professional”.
KEY FINDINGS
Going into ideation, the main needs of our users from the interviews that were conducted and surveys that were sent out were outlined as follows:
Information Architecture
To structure and organize the application, 15 participants from the same user pool of the surveys and interviews did a card sorting exercise using OptimalSort. Participants were asked to sort/organize by how they would group the provided content.
With data from the card sort, a sitemap using users’ identified patterns was drafted.
Wireframing
INITIAL SKETCHES
Keeping in mind the key findings, I grabbed some good old-fashioned pen and paper and started conceptualizing user flows.
MID-FIDELITY DESIGN
With some sketches under my belt, I decided to take the party to Sketch and create some low-fidelity wireframes that could be easily and quickly tested with users.
Final Concepts
SHOP BY DIET
With the shop by diet feature, users will be able to shop for groceries based on their dietary preferences.
One of the major complaints from our user interviews was that larger brands like Walmart, WholeFoods, and H.E.B mainly categorize groceries by department instead of dietary preferences.
Since these brands categorize inventory by department, it is easier to organize their grocery shopping applications by department.
However, users prefer to shop by their dietary preferences without having to sift through unwanted options, in order to save time.
SHOP BY LIST
With the shop by diet feature, we are giving users the opportunity to make a grocery list as they go through their day/week until they are ready to make a purchase.
Users will be able to make multiple lists, rebuy items from a list, and grant access to others in their household to add more items to the list.
SHOP BY RECIPES
Another major pain point for users from our user interviews was not knowing which foods to cook with the groceries they buy.
This leads to foodstuffs remaining unused in the back of the fridge until they went bad and had to be thrown out.
To help with this, the shop by recipes feature allows users to go through a list of recipes from renowned chefs worldwide.
Users have access to a wide variety of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert meals for which they can buy the required groceries.
Key Results
To validate our designs, we conducted a usability test. 32 users were asked to complete a list of tasks including searching for an item, putting it in the cart, and purchasing it using the prototype.
100%
of users were able to complete all tasks
12%
of users though able to complete all tasks, had some difficulty completing them
9o%
of users were excited about the shopping list feature
93%
of users were excited about the recipes feature and the ability to directly order groceries based on recipes
Reflections
CONTINUOUS ITERATION
As I have matured as a designer, I have learned to become comfortable with being uncomfortable with my design. Understanding that the process of creating something impactful requires testing at every stage and using the data from testing to rework the product is the key to powerful results. Throughout this project, I stopped to test the product, reworked my assumptions, and abandon ideas that failed. I have become confident in creating and testing ideas quickly.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Using feedback from usability tests, we were able to glean some insights to help refine the product. For example, some users complained that the search icon was not intuitive or easy to find, so this was replaced with a search bar with the word “Search” in it. The qualitative and quantitative data obtained during the earlier research phase and the latter testing phase were invaluable in refining the application and getting it closer to a final product.