Background

Through my experience as a Health Educator, I gained insight into military personnel’s stories. Many face barriers to creating and sustaining healthy lifestyles. For example, stressful, face paced schedules, limited incomes, skipping meals, frequent moves, growing families, and high cost of living. This initiated the creation of an grocery store app for a student project, which allows families to easily plan and order groceries while staying on budget and saving time. With obesity being the leading public health problem in the United States, creating grocery pick-up and delivery features can help families make healthier product choices, limit ordering takeout, prepare food, intake high fiber foods and relearn eating processes.

At-a-Glance

Trader Joe’s is a popular neighborhood grocery store chain and content creator favorite known for its unique and quality products.

By buying direct and in volume, removing unpopular products, and not charging supplier fees, they have successfully kept costs low while creating an enjoyable and inviting shopping experience. However, I believe that they have missed an opportunity to serve those with busy schedules and not physically able to shop store.

The Process

Survey Results

I surveyed 25 participants who have shopped at Trader Joe’s about their experience using online grocery shopping pickup and delivery apps. 16 out 25 use order online and pick in store and delivery services. Trader Joe’s was their preferred store over Target, Kroger, Walmart, Food Lion and other stores.

Insights

• Most participants preferred in-store shopping over online shopping.
• Enjoys picking quality produce, finding all and new product options, and correct replacements in-store.
• Shops online for packaged items.
• Pain to view ingredients, calories, health information, and competing options online.
• Cheaper and exact prices in-store.
• In-store shopping can be time consuming, online shopping saves time.
• Convenience is the main reason for online shopping.
• It’s frustrating to be around people in-store.
• Pickup service influences decision of where to shop.
• 5 participants do not drive.

“I have one kid and I’m pregnant with my second, curbside pickup or deliver is so much easier for me to manage.”

Persona

Journey Map

User Flow

User Stories

Paper First

The transition from the ideate and prototype process begins with my initial wireframes, then proceeds to mockups and ends with the high-fidelity prototype.

From Paper to Digital

Design System

User Testing

An unmoderated usability testing was conducted on five participants. I organized responses using an affinity diagram to find common themes amongst the participants.

The main goal was to figure out if placing online pickup and delivery orders in the mobile app actually saves time when grocery shopping.

Testers were asked to complete 3 tasks:

  1. Pick a date and time to schedule a pickup or delivery order.

  2. Select grocery items.

  3. Confirm scheduling of pickup/delivery order and complete the checkout process.

Common themes:

• All participants were able to complete checkout process.

• Confusion with adding more than 1 item to cart and switching between pickup and delivery.

• Kept accidently clicking buttons.

• Participants overlooked grocery list icon.

Lo-Fidelity Prototypes

I iterated on the previous design and created the design below to reflect themes taken from user testing.

  1. Moved cart button to bottom bar.

  2. Created additional screen for delivery.

  3. Declutter design.

    • Changed Reserve Pick up or Delivery Time button into a tab button to switch between pickup and delivery. Replaced Start Your Cart button with new pickup and delivery button.

    • Added store search bar on top on the screen and smaller location button to change store.

    • Removed save button and changed back button into smaller greater than button.

  4. Removed grocery list bottom bar icon and Make a List Before You Shop button and replaced with favorites list.

Design Changes

There were 4 changes to the design to organize and simplify.

Hi-Fidelity Prototypes

Final Designs

What I Learned

During my time working on this project, I learned the importance of gathering feedback from users in a diverse target audience. For instance, I surveyed current Trader Joe’s customers. Responses could of been biased due to customer loyalty. Some participants didn’t believe or like online shopping and preferred traditional in-store shopping. Some participants liked the experience of shopping inside of a local neighborhood grocery store. Also, I learned the significance of effective questions and tasks in surveys and user testing to produce qualitative and quantitative data.

Next Steps

To ensure a useful prototype for users, user research would need to be conducted to gather additional insights from a target audience to identify gaps. Previous data would be analyzed to find areas that require needed information, such as missing demographics, pain points, and user behaviors. This would include customers who do not shop at Trader Joe’s and use online grocery shopping apps. As this is a student project, there are factors that would need to be considered:

  • How the items quality will be stored and maintained?

  • How to transfer Trader Joe’s unique in-store experience to an seamless online shopping experience?

  • How to cut back costs of online pick and delivery fees and avoid third party deliveries?

  • What steps are unclear in design?