Capstone Design Project
Course
Capstone
Year
Fall 2021
Location
TX, USA
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Capstone is meant to represents our cornerstone university design project. This project was featured in the 2022 UT Design Exhibition, you can learn more about it here. After choosing the grocery store as my topic, I came up with a question to lead me trough my design process.
HOW CAN I MAKE GROCERY SHOPPING EASIER AND MORE ENJOYABLE?
1. Empathize
While I personally do enjoy grocery shopping, I know it is not perfect and recognize there is a lot of room for improvement. So to start, I interviewed shoppers and employees from my neighborhood H-E-B and Randall's grocery stores. My questions were specifically written to get my interviewees to tell me personal stories and share unique instances. I recorded all of the information I gathered and tried to organize it to visualize patterns and make connections.
One of the key people I interviewed was Lexi, a UT freshman I ran into at the seasonings aisle and proceeded to interview. She informed me that her biggest problem with grocery shopping was feeling overwhelmed. From our conversation I was able to identify 3 main reasons behind this:
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1. Too many options to choose from
2. No familiarity or recognition of a product/brand
3. Difficult to find the right brand at the right price with the right ingredients
2. Define
Similar interviews allowed me to identify three insights which I wanted my solution to focus on:
1. Aiding customers avoid crowds
2. Help shoppers make more informed decisions they can feel good about
3. Provide customers "shopping hacks" to make their experience smoother and less stressful.
3. Prototype
Once I had these insights , I brainstormed some quick concepts that would address one of the three insights. I especially liked the idea of actively engaging shoppers as they shopped, I just needed to find an engagement factor that was intuitive and simple to use.
I immediately got to work. I was interested in how wayfinding design could help shoppers by providing them some of the shopping techniques I learned about through my research. In order to answer some of these questions, I designed a simple sign on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, taped it to a wall at my local H-E-B, and started asking people questions. Most people told me they did not even notice the sign because they were so focused on their own shopping. Even though the color and design was supposed to emulate the southern flair of H-E-B, it matched the color scheme too much and blended into the background perfectly. I quickly realized this was not an effective way to engage shoppers. This discovery was a huge help, though, as it helped me realize I needed to find a better way to guide shopper behavior. And an app seemed to be the perfect tool to help shoppers make smart decisions and stay organized.
​H-E-B alongside many other grocery stores already have an app, but seeing H-E-B’s was released in late 2019, the features of the app leave a lot to be desired, and it is most definitely NOT designed around the EXPERIENCE of grocery shopping.
I designed an app to try to address the three insights I had discovered from through research. And I call it the HEB Grocery Guide app. This app seeks to provide shoppers with more information so they can make better informed decisions while facilitating the shopping process to get them in and out of the store faster.
This is a poster graphic I designed for the in-person exhibition. It was designed so that people could easily learn what my project is about without having to watch my 5 minute video.
I started with their basic layout and built features on top of it that would provide users information, like the traffic meter on the homepage, as well as organize the shopping experience to make it faster, like adding a shortcut to your shopping list on the homepage.
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By having a live indicator of how busy a store is, shoppers can plan out their trip better to avoid heavy crowds. The shopping list shortcut on the homepage allows you to scan the barcode of any item to quickly input the specific brand without having to type anything. On the other hand, my app allows the shopper to add unspecified items to your list and then easily specify the type later. So for example, if you add “bread” into your shopping list, the app provides you a list of possible bread options that you can sort through to find the perfect kind.
One of the key features of the app is the ability to generate a personalized path around the store based on the items in your shopping list. This provides HEB shoppers the shortest possible route around any HEB store so that they never have to worry about forgetting to pick something up or spending 15 minutes looking for one product.
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To help shoppers decide between hundreds of price points, branding, and ingredients, the app provides shoppers with customer reviews. By having access to honest feedback about the options, shoppers can be more informed and feel better about their purchases.
The last big feature I included in this app is meal recipe recommendations on the home page. These are generated from a list of ingredients the app recognizes as repeated purchases. This provides shoppers with new delicious meal ideas that are made of products they are already familiar with. By having these recipes on the homepage, you can easily add the recipe list into your shopping list to make shopping even easier.
These are just some of the initial research-based design decisions I’ve made, and plan on continuing to improve it based on further behavioral research. I would love to keep improving this project, so feel free to contact me if you have any ideas or critiques, thank you.