Grocery Prime - Usability Research

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Grocery Prime Usability Research

Grocery Prime, a supermarket, was considering implementing an app to their shopping experience to help users fulfill their needs.

My objective in this project was to uncover people’s problems in supermarkets to find a solution that would work with the app. I identified who their target would be and wrote a script to find and interview these people, and... failed. I went to public spaces but everyone was busy, so I made a Google Form and asked some friends to send them to some of their friends and finally it worked. I got my precious answers on a spreadsheet and started analyzing it. Human Behavior is hard to understand, but giving it some effort, I found the pain points that this app could solve.

This project taught me about analyzing user’s needs to implement it on an app, and also, how to make a survey.

Project's Problem

The objective of this project is to find pain points in grocery shopping that an app could solve. We have to understand the experience the user goes through to identify annoyances that this app could fix. How might we find the pain point? After finding the pain points, how might we eliminate them?

Audience

The audience of this project are customers that make grocery shopping at least twice a month, own a smartphone, and have little time to make groceries because they have a full time occupation such as study or work.

When proceeding to the interview, the first place to visit would be a supermarket and from the target description, the people we can approach are parents, which we could identify with baby buggies or children. Also, workers and college students could be interviewed and they usually go around 20 and 40 years old.

My Process

The first thing that I did was defining 5 specific topics that I want to explore in grocery shopping, these are:

1) Choosing different products.

2) Finding specific products.

3) Time used to make groceries.

4) Making lines and checking out.

5) Carrying bags.

I had to interview people, so based on these topics, I wrote down a script with some rich and open ended questions.

1) The moment you compare products, what is the factor that makes you choose one over the other?

2) What do you typically do when you have to find a very specific product?

3) Which part of grocery shopping do you think takes more time?

4) Do you prefer checking out yourself or with a cashier? Why?

5) How do you carry your bags after making groceries?

6) How do you feel when making groceries?

When interviewing users, it's fundamental to avoid biasing them with leading questions, instead we could ask open ended questions. So instead of asking "do you think this supermarket is cool?" we ask "what do you think about the supermarket?". Also, we should avoid making the participants feel uncomfortable. With this in mind, I prepared a document to carry when interviewing people, you can see it here.

In the script, you can see how every interaction is already written, from introduction to conclusion. This ensures that I say the same words to each participant and I have answers based on only one script. Having no guideline could lead to rephrasing things in different ways per each participant that I encounter and that would result in inaccurate answers without any clear direction. Also, the first question is an easy one to warm up and help the participant feel comfortable.

So I was ready, script in my hand, smile in my face, and I went out. My first location, the supermarket, didn't allow me to make the survey so I walked to a close park where many people pass by. I tried interviewing a lot of people but everyone was busy. The only person willing to help be didn't know Spanish, English or Italian (the languages that I speak) but at least he improved my mood.

With this problem in hand, I re-planned everything. I rewrote the script in a Google form and I asked some friends to contact people to send the online form. After a couple of hours, I finally got enough answers to start analyzing, here are the results:

1) The moment you compare products, what is the factor that makes you choose one over the other?
Participant 1: Quality - Prize

Participant 2: The Brand

Participant 3: Quality

Participant 4: Known brands

Participant 5: Good quality/prize ratio

2) What do you typically do when you have to find a very specific product?
Participant 1: Internet search

Participant 2: Ask an employee

Participant 3: Find out where it’s sold

Participant 4: Look it up on the area where it should be sold

Participant 5: Go to big supermarket where it’s probable could be found

3) Which part of grocery shopping do you think takes more time?
Participant 1: Vegetable section

Participant 2: Meats section

Participant 3: Grains and flours.

Participant 4: Meats section

Participant 5: Vegetable and fruit section

4) Do you prefer checking out yourself or with a cashier? Why?
Participant 1: Cashier

Participant 2: N/A

Participant 3: N/A

Participant 4: N/A

Participant 5: Cashiers because they are faster

5) How do you carry your bags after making groceries?
Participant 1: Car

Participant 2: Car

Participant 3: Bags

Participant 4: Car

Participant 5: Public transport

6) How do you feel when making groceries?
Participant 1: Happy

Participant 2: Good - likes this activity

Participant 3: Good - even if it’s an obligation.

Participant 4: Focused and having fun

Participant 5: Relaxed and calm

After reading and considering the different answers, this is my result:

From the overall opinions, seems to be that grocery shopping is a fun activity even if it’s an obligation. When choosing products people go for the brands that they know so they can have good quality. Most of them carry their groceries on cars so it seems that delivery it's not a particular problem. The main pain point identified comes in the supermarket sections where there is a need to take an extra step (vegetables, meats, flours, and grains). Additionally, the way that people look for specific products is varied, and not finding a good could be frustrating.

As said before, the main pain point identified was the time taken in those products that need measuring such as vegetables, meats, grains, and flours, so acting upon this could reduce the time the user would take on the supermarket. This is probably because these sections are self-service and it takes time to grab each product and measure it; if the supermarket had an automatic measuring section, customers could signal on the app, for example, "300 gr of broccoli" and receive it directly in a bag, or add everything together into one bag, add up the prices and save time and plastic bags in the process.

Also, an interesting observation that could be a pain point is the fact that when looking for a specific product, most people gave a different answer which means there isn't a "global way" to be sure where to find a product, therefore if the app could signal where and in which supermarket we can find this product we could help customers save time and frustrations.

Finally, people seemed to be very interested in brands that they can trust, therefore, the supermarket could benefit from this by signaling per each product which brand is the most trustworthy, considering a good price/quality ratio.

I finished this project by writing an Affinity Diagram with the main points of the research:

Affinity Diagram

Outcome and What I Learned

The final result is the knowledge of what the app could solve, after a prototype is built with these features, we could proceed with an Usability Test. I learned that is hard to interview people on the street, this is a skill I would like to train; maybe if we interview them on a calm place like a cafeteria people would be more willing to help. I learned to analyze user insights, how certain opinions could mean possible features of a design. Finally, I learned to be patient and change the direction of a project to keep the objective going.