Description: The purpose of project 2 is to create a way to make the experience of in-person grocery shopping more engaging and delightful for the customers. Our goal was to understand the needs of Purdue students when grocery shopping, channeling this knowledge to inform the design of a refined experience for students that maximizes meaningful, positive, and empowering embodied patterns of interaction in the physical store environment. Through this project we will collect and analyze data, sketch, create a presentation video, and evaluate and improve our information of our design outcomes.
draft of out system analysis
Problem Statement: New college students have busy schedules and need help navigating stores in a timely manner.
Design Question: How can we create a system that allows for greater productive engagement between stores and college students?
For our solution idea is a navigation app called Schmapp, an app that makes shopping more efficient for college students who have a limited time to shop between classes. This app is designed for you to make or upload a list where it will then calculate the quickest route for you to take throughout the grocery store, while additionally suggesting more grocery items to buy.
Secondary Research: After defining and figuring out our problem statement we began our research. Each of us researched articles related to the topics of grocery shopping, shopping habits, and college student shopping habits.
Our findings from our secondary research covered areas like:
Main problems people face when shopping is not knowing where an item is placed in the store, and poorly designed signs and labeling make the shopping experience difficult. Online grocery shopping can be convenient but you should always consider product quality. People tend to like to go into stores to see how a product holds up to their standards. It also protects them from online scams. When grocery shopping, it's important to have great grocery shopping skills like reading food labels, planning shopping lists, and selecting products that represent the best value for money. It’s up to the college student to be smart when grocery shopping because as they live independently, because what they shop determines their health outcomes.
My Thoughts: After doing all of the research for this project, I learned the importance of grocery shopping and the right skills you must acquire as you shop. I personally prefer in-person shopping because I like to see what I buy. As a college student I value the significance of grocery shopping and learning about the pros and cons of grocery shopping was very helpful.
Affinity diagram from our interviews.
Our AEIOU chart from our observations.
Interviews
After researching, we moved on to data, with three team members conducting an interview. ****Through those interviews we’ve discovered that students would benefit from a way to better organize the shopping experience allowing for less time spent in stores. Limiting the amount of time in the store would lessen feelings of being overwhelmed.
Observations
Through this activity, three of us conducted observations. We got a better understanding of how our user group shops. Noticing the patterns in how they paced back and forth between the aisles made us understand that there needs to be a more efficient way to help students find their items faster instead of returning to the same aisles again. This leads us to the prototyping section of our design process where we took our observations and made scenarios and storyboards.
My Thoughts: As I conducted an observation, I found it interesting, insightful, and fun to observe and analysis college people’s shopping habits.
After acquiring our data and research, we started prototyping, which means having all of us create scenarios and storyboards that enhances the human-to human interaction.
Scenario: User Journey Map
For our scenario, we created a user journey map . The purpose of this journey map is to break down the shopping process into five parts and really understand the emotions and thoughts a college student goes through in each step as they shop. The outcome of this journey map conveys the emotions the customer experiences as they shop and provides ideas on what the service side can improve on to make the shopping experience easier and enjoyable for the customer.
Storyboard
After creating our journey map, we then created multiple storyboards to visually map out the user’s experience with product or service. Storyboards consider the different steps the user might go through as they interact with the product. The storyboards above help understand users' motivations and the steps they went through as they shop. Through these storyboards, you can really understand the steps needed to take in order to have the best shopping experience while using our product: Schmapp. The storyboards visually guide through the production process and what types of interactions will be required and predict how users might interact with the interface.
Sketches
Our purpose in sketching the design of our app was to understand all of the functions the app would require in order to make our design useful to new college students. Through designing prototypes we were able to understand the different functions and tasks that our app needs to be able to do in order to benefit the shopper and not hinder them.
Presentation video
The purpose of our video was to showcase our design in an engaging manner while being able to provide viewers with a comprehensible view of what our product would accomplish and how it would work to further benefit their shopping experience. The video helped us visualize the problem at hand and how our app helps college students shop more effectively. It mapped out the process from start to finish to make the experience come to life. We found it helpful to show screens and a user scenario to make the situation relatable to our intended users.
Our user journey map for grocery shopping
An example of one of the many storyboards my group made
One of your app layout design mockups
My thoughts: I found the user journey map very helpful because you understand the user’s perspective and emotions as they use and interact the product. Storyboards and sketches are always helpful to visualize understand the product. Creating a video is a nice and newer way to visualize the problem statement and the user scenario.
Individual contribution: In this project, my contributions included finding and summarizing an article, conducting an observation, drawing several sketches, several storyboards and the conclusion. Additionally I contributed to the user journey map and AEIOU chart. Lastly I contributed greatly to the layout and editing of our team’s documentation.
Reflection: The project taught me the importance of using the steps in the design process correctly. In the design process, you start off with your problem statement, from that statement you conduct all of your research, data, prototypes, and solution based on your problem statement, so it's important to have your statement be clear and connected with the rest of the parts. In this project, I found the topic of grocery shopping and our assignment of that topic challenging at first because even though I related to the topic, it was still difficult creating a solution that hasn’t already been created or implemented in some way as we grocery shop. I also found observing people as they grocery shop insightful because it was interesting to discover other people’s different shopping habits. Overall, this whole process for this project has been challenging in some ways but also interesting, and I loved how our project came together in the end.