Concept design | UX design

Grocery shopping assistant

Overview

Time: 2 weeks

Team: 1 person

Role: Research, Customer journey, Concept design, UX design

Challenge

Design a solution that makes daily grocery shopping more fun, more meaningful, more efficient, or all of these.

Goal

As retail and food industries have major contributions to environmental issues, they are responsible and at the same time have great opportunities to make a shift in consumers’ behaviors. Thus, my goal is to assist retailer businesses and consumers make conscious choices regarding what products to sell and consume.

Research

3 interviews conducted

Target audiences

Young people in Finland who care about environmental issues and want to support ecological brands & products haven’t downloaded a supermarket app.

The interviews were conducted to:

  • understand their grocery shopping processes

  • identify challenges they face when doing grocery shopping

  • discover criteria & influences when choosing a brand & products

Personas

A persona was created to represent the target users.

Customer journey

Ideation

Problem statements & How-might-we

Problems statements are formulated when I considered people’s frustrations and thinking throughout their journey. From there, I applied How-might-we method to ideate different solutions for the problems

Concept design

Goals

Final concept

After some ideation, I decided to go with the concept of a virtual assistant providing a hybrid experience at the supermarket that:

  • Providing personalized assistance whenever & wherever customers need it through both in-store and online shopping

  • Assisting customers in making an informed and conscious choice by providing concise and essential information about products/ brands

  • Familiarizing customers with an online grocery shopping experience through intuitive and friendly interaction from in-store to online

  • Understand customers’ motivations, preferences, and demands for products

Task flow

With limited time, I decided to focus on in-store experience and 2 main cases when Virtual assistant will be helpful

Main screens

The main screens will focus on the mobile experience as VA can serve many people at the same time via their mobile phone

What I have learned

In such a time-limited project, I have learned the importance of a customer journey to understand a holistic view on motivations/needs on when to buy groceries and to zoom-in on different feelings throughout their shopping journey.

With little time to focus on the project due to our work, there are many things still missing in the projects:

  • Consider more use cases that the Virtual assistant can help customers with

  • Validate & test how the interaction between VA and customers in a real setup

  • How to make VA more inclusive for different target audiences