Indiana University
3 months
Akshay Yelmar
Sathwik Aala
Abhinav Sikharam
Stalin Thomas
Alex Metschke
I owned the final deliverables for concept diagrams, storyboards, wireframes, and visual designs.
I contributed to research planning, contextual inquiries, traditional interviews, analyzing and reporting findings from the research, and ideation.
It was a semester-long project focusing on collecting data using formative research methods, analyzing the data, and generating high-level concepts informed by the research insights.
Identify opportunities to design functionality for a product that supports grocery shopping activities in a new, innovative way that provides an improved user experience.
Our research process consisted of deciding high-level research questions and selecting methods to support the research objectives effectively. For the analysis part, we utilized methods to capture insights and model target users and their behavior.
The background research with literature review helped us analyze the prior research work in this space. It also guided us in deciding the goals for our formative research.
We conducted contextual inquiries with five participants to understand their shopping behavior. We observed things like breakdowns, delays, strategies they used to select a product, explore different items and aisles, their motivations, intentions, and other interactions relevant to the design of our product.
Key takeaways from the contextual inquiry:
We also conducted five semi-structured in-depth interviews with the same participants after they concluded their shopping activity.
We used various analysis methods to make sense of the data we collected during our contextual inquiries and traditional interviews.
Using the data collected from the contextual and traditional interviews, we created an Affinity Diagram with a bottom-up approach as below and found several insights.
Users carry their shopping list with them to the grocery store and rely heavily on it while shopping.
"Before I leave for shopping, I go through my pantry and note down all the items I need to buy in my phone"
Users rely on their memory to find the items and often face difficulties finding the correct aisles and shelves.
"Sometimes you expect an item to be in aisle 4. But when you go there, you won’t find it. It would be in a different aisle"
Users often end up exceeding the regular budget for grocery shopping.
"Before going to the store, I try to make up my mind to spend only a certain amount of money. But I always overspend"
Users find the product labels with insufficient information confusing and spend a lot of time figuring it out.
"It is usually hard to read the labels on the shelves. They are always in short forms which are difficult to understand"
Based on the interactions we had with the users and insights from the Affinity diagram, we created a persona for this project as below
The analysis methods helped us gain a shared understanding of the target users, their activities, and behavior which informed our initial explorations of product concepts.
We used the visioning method to collectively brainstorm on the new and innovative solutions to help users achieve their intents and address their pain points. We conceptualized two product visions grounded in findings from our research phase.
Concept 01
MR (Mixed Reality) smart glasses for an enhanced in-store grocery shopping experience
Pros
Cons
Concept 02
An IoT solution for simplifying shopping lists and effective budget planning during in-store grocery shopping using a smart cart with a tablet.
Pros
Cons
After collaboratively evaluating the pros and cons of each concept, we decided to explore the concept 02 - Smart shopping cart.
We created low-fi concepts to capture the core functionalities that the smart cart product would support.
The above storyboards helped us visualize the user's environment and guided conversations around key aspects of the user's experience. For example, how might we provide feedback to the user once they scan the item and add it to the cart?
In our final high-fidelity concepts, we converged on following design decisions to address the user's pain points and help them achieve their goals.
The in-store shoppers like Michael can always keep track of the items to buy while shopping. It would reduce the chance of missing out on items from the shopping list significantly.
The running total of the shopping cart and the budget section allows users to monitor their spending and stay within their regular shopping budget.
The users can skip the long lines for checkouts by simply making the payment via smart cart interface once they conclude their shopping activity.
For our high-level product concept, we focused only on the core functionalities based on our research. However, in the future, we could prioritize and add the following features to enhance the user experience.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, we could not evaluate our product concept with the target users. If we had more time, we would have performed the following activities.