1. The Challenge

Problem to Solve

As we enter a technological revolution, many previously-common in person experiences has been shifting into more convenient, remote settings. People stream movies instead of visiting local theatres, order food through third party services instead of picking it up, and so on so forth.

These opportunities create more flexibility and convenience  for the customers while typically removing opportunities for these  establishments, especially with the involvement of 3rd party services. We took this idea into mind when exploring solutions that would not eliminate employee opportunities but also ease both employee and customer frustrations from in person grocery shopping

Our Goals

1. Learn audience needs & expectations

Through user interviews and surveys, we hoped to learn more about employee frustrations, customer pain points, and what customer prioritized in grocery shopping

2. Identify the most common problems faced  for both employees and shoppers

From our qualitative data, we hoped to learn what is most important and common problems and needs to customers and employees. We hoped to do this through survey analysis and affinity diagramming.

3. Create deliverables that accurately represent audience needs

Based on our key insights, we wanted to create 2 personas, a story board, and a journey map that accurately represent audience needs and can be easily referenced through the rest of the design process

2. User Interviews

Interviews Overview

To really understand the needs and frustrations of grocery shopping customers and employees, we conducted 6  semi-structured user interviews -- 2 of them being with current and former grocery store employees. We asked about their experiences, focusing on positive and negative aspects. After the interviews, we also had participants do short mapping activities to help us better visualize a typical shopping experience or work shift.

Participants and Recruitment

Participants were all recruited via our social networks. We reached out to people we knew who met the following inclusion criteria: people who make online purchases frequently & people who frequently purchase groceries, or people who have worked in grocery stores. When reaching out, we gave general explanations of our project topic (to reduce leading question biases) and debriefed participants afterwards.

Interview Structure

Each interview lasted approximately 45 minutes, with 30 minutes for questions and 15 minutes for our deep focus activity. During the interview question portion, we started out with explaining our informed consent guide, continued with general questions, and dove deeper to gather more concrete insights on needs and frustrations throughout the interview process.

Afterwards, we conducted a mapping activity, in which we asked participants to map out a typical work shift or a typical manner in which participants prepare to grocery shop. With this activity, we learned about the most common experiences participants had and what customers typically deemed as 'important' when shopping for groceries.

Interviews were wrapped up with a debriefing session and gave participants an opportunity to ask any underlying questions they may have unanswered.

3. Interview Analysis

Coding Qualitative Data

To best analyze the interview data we had, we developed a codebook of common themes we found and used this to code the transcribed interview notes. While coding, we broke down the code into 3 parts: the participant quote, the "code" the quote fit into, and an "I" or "me" statement from the participant's perspective to summarize and describe the primary point being made in the quote.  We each had read the notes for each interview and individually coded 2 interviews.

Affinity Diagramming

From there, we transported each code chunk into a collaborative Miro board and worked on finding patterns in the various code chunks in order to find common themes and patterns between participants. A screenshot of the Miro board can be viewed below. These commonalities helped drive our next steps in survey design,  collection, and analysis.

4. Survey Design and Analysis

Survey Overview

We gained many valuable insights from our interviews, but to go more in depth, we conducted a survey, too. Our primary objective was to gain comprehensive understanding of how customers currently plan and purchase their groceries, with specific goals of learning online ordering platforms  customers use, seeing how online grocery orders differ from customers' typical in-person orders, figure out how often  people order online vs in-person, and find out advantages/disadvantages of shopping in-person vs online.

Survey Design

Our survey had two screener questions: Have you purchased groceries in the past two months? and Have you ever shopped for groceries through an online ordering system? If participants answered yes to both, they continued to answer the remaining questions. Our survey consisted of a total of 16 questions with various answering methods: short answer, linear scale, multiple choice, and check boxes. We had a total of 20 respondents, excluding those who were screened out.

Analysis Findings

Our survey data was analyzed and visualized through 4 different types of graphs. For each finding, we combined 2 different survey response questions. Our findings were based off of information from the data that we found surprising/interesting or that confirmed/disproved our prior assumptions and beliefs.

‍

Finding 1

There's a slight correlation between less busy students and  grocery shopping more in person.

‍

‍

‍

Finding 2

People who prefer shopping in person for the reason of selecting their own items are less inclined to purchase produce, meat, and other perishable items through delivery.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Finding 3

The average busy-ness of students do not seem to differ by much by grocery shopping modality preference. People who shop in person more do seem to be slightly busier than people who shop online, but not by much.

‍

‍

‍

Finding 4

Students who grocery shop online seem to have slightly more frequent grocery purchases in a given month than students who grocery shop in person.

‍

‍

‍

5. Deliverables

Deliverable overview

Based on these insights we found and the most common pain points we noticed, we created 1 persona of a busy student grocery shopper. This persona was used when and our experience map of the future experience.We had a goal of creating a second persona to highlight the over-worked grocery store employee; we still kept this idea in mind when creating our storyboard of the current experience.

Persona 1

Future Experience map

Current Experience Storyboard

6. Retrospect & Next Steps

Reflection

Looking back, if I were to be able to redo this assignment differently, I would have better polished survey questions to better represent our goals and provide us with more concrete findings, as our findings were insightful but not exactly representative of our survey goals that we had laid our initially.

If provided with more time, it would have also been useful to have been able to administer a survey for grocery store employees and learn more details about their experiences, as well. This would have provided us with a lot more context to create a persona that accurately highlights the current grocery store employee motif.

Next Steps

If I were to continue this study, it would be useful to take the gathered data as a good basing point, and start working on the design portion of the user experience journey. It would be useful to focus on features deemed as key to users (i.e. a feature to check produce quality for online orders).

Paper prototyping can be useful to start and figure out the ideal layout for customers, in which their original pain points are reduced and no further pain points are created through the design solution.

While the design phase is underway, it is key to ensure that testing is still done every step of the way to ensure the team is heading in the right direction and are not leading themselves astray due to assumptions. Our deliverables can be used as initial basises to start creating designs, but validation is still essential every step of the way

‍