Case Study
Grocery App
For this project I wanted to discover the pain points people experience when using a grocery shopping app and then address them by building a taskflow to fix the pain points. This involved user interviews, wireframing, prototyping, and testing to come up with a final solution that would appeal to a wide range of regular grocery app users.
Problem
Identify and interview a target audience to test a grocery app. Evaluate the interview results and build a taskflow in the app to address the pain points that were uncovered in the user interview and testing process.
Audience
For this project I was tasked with identifying the target audience myself rather than have it presented to me. I only needed 5 users for my test so I put a call out on social media for grocery app users who use an app at least once a month to purchase their groceries. I was able to find 5 users quickly and from there I set up interviews with each one using a discussion guide. I consolidated all my interview notes and it was revealed that the most common pain point users experienced had to do with the search function being too broad or returning the wrong results. This became my issue to address with the app taskflow.
Sketching
Having narrowed down our pain point to the search function I began sketching ideas to help solve the issue. It was going to be important to keep the entire app as straight forward as possible while also solving the search function issue so that I didn’t create new pain points in the process. The feature that stood out to me as a solution to our pain point was an onboarding process that could help narrow down or even ‘learn’ a users search habits. I started to build this process into a few simple steps.
Prototype Testing and Solution
I made a high fidelity wireframe after narrowing down the features through the sketching process. After that I went back to the same 5 users to do a test of the prototype. I asked them to give me feedback as they walked through the four pages of the app that led up to the search function improvements I made. The feedback for the onboarding process was very positive and when it came to the search function improvements the users felt this would likely improve the pain points they had experienced using other apps. I utilized some very quick and easy accordion menu questions to help learn the shopping habits of a new user. Recognizing that any extra time given to onboarding might be frustrating for a new user I made sure that it would be incentivized with a discount on their first order.
Learnings
This project got me looking forward to the possibility of working with a developer on the coding side to see this idea really come to life. I believe I improved the user experience compared to the popular grocery apps by enhancing the search feature and I know that it would be a big project to make it work on the backend as smoothly as it functions on the front end. I also noticed after the fact that my logo placement wasn’t ideal for the new iPhone 14 so I would want to adjust that moving forward. The user interview process was also helpful experience, and next time a larger user testing group would give me even more insight into how I could tackle pain points users are experiencing.