Friendly Grocer Website
A not-for-profit collective of small independently owned supermarkets. The brief was to create a site that would encourage customers to shop online to increase both market share and sales.
We created a viable and realistic solution that provided a short-term plan and ideas for future expansion. This was after interviewing multiple stakeholders, both customers and workers. Our solution
was based on existing shopping behaviours to maximise its chance of success and minimise risk for the business.
While working end to end on the entirety of the project I was in charge of starting our project off as Manager of Discover Stage.
The project lasted one month.
Methodology of Project
Online Grocery Market
Research clearly showed that online grocery shopping sales and deliveries were increasing rapidly due to the Covid pandemic.
Friendly Grocer was not benefiting from this change of customer behaviour as they did not provide any form of online sales.
Interviews with workers involved in setting up or operating online grocery sales gave us an understanding of how high the demands would be on our small grocery stores to set up a full home delivery service.
We would explore ways to start with an MVP form of online shopping that was not too financially risky and would be easy to implement. We also needed to find a way to give them a point of difference from the big three brands that hold most of the market share.
Workers involved in online sales and deliveries:
One of my interviews was with someone who had set up a nationwide system of supply chain purchases and wholesale deliveries for a baker and coffee roasters. I learned an enormous amount about how much is needed behind the scenes to deliver a smooth online service. This reinforced to me the importance of interviewing more than one stakeholder for a project or you risk not creating a viable solution for the client as you don't know enough about the overall operation without asking.
Nine shoppers were asked about their shopping habits before and after Covid lockdowns were in place:
Online field studies were conducted on a shoppers preferred supermarket website.
Shopping is more of a chore when done online, most wanted to just get it over with.
As they carried out their regular shopping routine we discovered most go straight to their bought before items, add items straight to cart and rarely browse other areas of the site.
For extra analysis we got our shoppers to complete a purchase on a site they had not used before.
It showed how they interacted with the features of a site without relying on automated habits.
The card sorting involved ten users and fifty grocery items.
Our users took part in an Open Card Sort and the resulting labels were random, vague and funny but not a great deal of help with information architecture planning.
In hindsight, the group decided a closed or hybrid method may have made the resulting data more informative and we did rely more on industry standards than ideation from these tasks.
Insights showed that grocery buying habits when shopping in-store compared to online were a little different. However, which store they chose to shop at remained consistent when moving to a home delivery service.
Most users still relied on the three big brands for their main shop.
Many of our interviewees had only begun to use online shopping and delivery due to the Covid pandemic because of a desire to stay away from crowded places.
Most customers use smaller grocery stores such as Friendly Grocer for smaller top-up shopping when they only need a few items.
They were also likely to "drop-in" due to proximity of location when passing by or for speed and convenience if they had forgotten something from their 'big shop"
Many users were waiting up to four days to get a delivery timeslot and this meant they would need to purchase items at a local grocery store in between ordering and receiving their groceries.
This often meant compromising on what they thought of as "Covid Safe" shopping by visiting a store in person.
Meet Nicole: who is new to online grocery shopping
Nicole's existing journey map: online shopping delays
After team ideation sessions we concluded that Friendly Grocer needed to find a point of difference from larger chains for their online service that would fit in with existing customer behaviours.
Covid safe shopping was a clear priority amongst shoppers and Friendly Grocer may not get a better opportunity to test if an online service could increase both market share and sales.
Solutions would need to be realistic and financially viable for any small supermarket to implement as highlighted by insights from workers earlier in the project.
Problem Statement:
Nicole needs to receive her groceries in a timely manner, because she is currently frustrated with spending too much time waiting to receive her grocery delivery.
Nicole needs to receive her groceries in a timely manner because she is currently frustrated with spending too much time waiting to receive her grocery delivery.
Problem Statement:
Impact Effort Matrix created after ideation sessions of Crazy 8's, How Might We statements and voting on favourite solutions as part of team discussions and ideation workshops.
The two areas of waiting where we could save time for our shoppers included deliveries only being available days later as well as those timeslots being four hours long.
Our solutions were reflective of existing customer behaviours at their local supermarket, influenced by our two sets of interviewees and reinforced by a site visit to Friendly Grocer at Glebe and other small grocery stores.
Introducing Friendly Grocer Click and Collect Service
A site visit lead us away from full delivery service as an MVP solution.
Friendly Grocer Glebe, like many smaller supermarkets, is on a main road with no parking at the front and limited rear access.
Key Features for MVP Website:
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"NO MINIMUM SPEND" Shoppers use local grocers for smaller purchases and this gives our site a point of difference from the big three brands.
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"PICK-UP TIME" is booked first before any shopping items are added to the cart. Field studies showed spending time filling a cart before finding out there was no delivery time available was a major pain point for our shoppers.
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"ADD TO CART FROM SEARCH MENU" fits with shoppers not engaging with extra information about products. They usually shop what they know and want to spend as little time as possible on the site.
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"Click and Collect" would allow Covid safe shopping.
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"Click and Collect" would be a cost-effective and quick way to enter the online sales market.
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Many stores would need extensive renovations and structural changes to make a full delivery service feasible. Our MVP would allow each store to explore if this was a viable future proposition.
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Full delivery service would require more staff.
User Flow Highlighting MVP Key Features
Before constructing our paper wireframe and prototype we did further competitor analysis to ensure best practice for our user flow and information architecture. How could we make online shopping feel less like a chore for users?
Prototype and Usability Testing
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1. Choose Store: product range varies greatly between stores.
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2. Choose Time: a major pain point during field studies was that selecting a delivery time was occurring as part of the check-out stage once shopping was completed. Often there was no suitable time available and users felt they had totally wasted their time.
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3. The Search Bar is a main feature as shoppers preferred to shop via search function rather than drop-down menus during field studies. 4/6 users tried to shop from the search bar as their first interaction with the site.
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Although placed top left of the screen users did not instinctively know that choosing a store was the first thing they should do. 4/6 users attempted to shop via the Search bar as their first task as per their usual shopping sites.
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Our solution was to add a pop-up that would appear when users first visited the site, and remember the selection for future visits.
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A comparative study of an airline booking site influenced our decision to use drop-down menus to Choose a Store and select a Click and Collect time.
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We wanted to streamline the process as much as possible and users responded well to the overall flow of the site.
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The first prototype involved selecting a date and then clicking "Select A Time" to view the options plus needing to click on the actual time to select it. One reduction in the steps for this process will be to enable the Select Time drop-down menu to open automatically as the date is selected.
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During testing, users questioned if they had successfully added the item to the cart as the -/+ bar graphic did not change.
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6/6 users attempted to click the -/+ function after already adding an item to the cart.
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The "Added to Cart" would replace the +/- button once an item was added to the cart to provide clearer confirmation.
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Disappointingly we were unable to gather insights regarding our "Add to Cart" from Search results feature as there was a fault in the prototype. The Search bar was not clickable and only typing C, for cheese, would have activated this feature. Not a common or intuitive way to start a search and users moved to the menu selection option to complete the task.
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4/6 users attempted to shop by the search bar as the first interaction on the site which gives the assumption it will prove successful in later rounds.
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5/6 users found their item through the items menu, and 1/6 was told to type C after much frustration on his side.
Only one round of usability testing was conducted before the end of the project.
If the Click and Collect service is popular with customers and shown to increase profit some Friendly Grocer stores may be able to upgrade to a delivery service.
My Key Takeaways
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Interviewing multiple stakeholders during the research stage is one key to realistic solutions by identifying more possible pain points.
- Looking at a comparative business and their industry-standard websites may help find better solutions within your project than studying just your direct competitors.
- An Open Card Sort may not be as helpful as other methods. In this case, it caused a bit of chaos when planning our information architecture.
- Study every step of your prototype settings very carefully or one key feature may remain totally untested.
- Everyone has different ideas when affinity mapping, we could have created a few rough labels before starting to sort to avoid repetition of categories and crossed wires while also saving time.
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The most obvious or fancy solution to a problem may not be the most suitable.