Shopping list feature on the Carrefour Mobile & Web

The first step I took was to thoroughly go through the Carrefour mobile app and website, after an initial browse of the features I tried to create a shopping list on the mobile app, and in the process I was considering if there’s any design/flow dependency on the shopping list feature experience itself.

Initial Observations, Thoughts and Assumptions

1. The onboarding is quite lean, doesn’t force the user to register or login right away, unlike some of the competitors like Big Bazaar in India, that won’t let a user proceed without providing a phone number on their mobile app.
2. While interacting with a feature on the Carrefour mobile app for the first time, quick feature onboarding hints/tutorials are very helpful and intuitive. (e.g: swipe left to remove an item that has just been added to the cart.)
3. Observing the plethora of categories of products on the website/app, and creating a mental map of how products fall into different categories, and how when a user comes to the app, do they think of the category first or the product itself that they are looking for.
4. How do users go about making a list for grocery shopping, and does the behaviour vary depending what time of the day or week it is, meaning if its different ahead of a long weekend or in the evenings when its busier compared to afternoons or normal weekdays.
5. For the sake of scope I’ll be narrowing my assumption to a grocery list.

Double diamond design process

After initial browsing and carefully considering the Insight, Task and Deliverables I decided to follow the Double diamond design process mapped by the British Council.

Discovery

Research

I decided to do an initial competitive analysis with some of the leading hypermarket chains as well as some smaller supermarket companies such as Big Bazaar, Big Basket, Woolworths and e-Commerce Amazon, also came across an app that is specifically for creating shopping lists called OurGroceries.

I also did research on in-store shopping experience, came across studies about campaigns done to understand user behaviour when in store, this was not directly associated to the task we are trying to solve, but you never know what you might chance upon in research and campaigns already run by other brands. Some insights that I picked up from those studies that could be used in the larger picture of things is :

By exceeding expectations you drive emotional reactions.

Experiential retail can be used to empower a shopping experience.

Analysis

This analysis helped to figure out if there is any potential dependancy on other features, before our user can comes across the shopping list feature.

Some of the trends that I picked up on competitive apps is :

Big Basket:

• Easy onboarding
• User can browse the app before login and register.
• Shopping list is just another name for cart.
• Swipe interaction within the shopping list is for “remove item” which is similar to reduce quantity feature. {-1+}.

Our Groceries:

• No onboarding, goes straight to the main screen.
• Ability to add multiple shopping lists.
• Ability to cross off items.
• Can’t figure out how to cross off items though (non-intuitive).

Big Bazaar:

• No shopping list feature.
• Frustrating onboarding
• Mandatory register or login before being able to access the app features at all.
• Mundane and uninteresting cart design.

Amazon: (for the sake of shopping list feature)

• “Shopping Lists” feature is one layer within the hamburger button.
• “Create a new list” & “Your friends lists”
• Couldn’t figure out how to just start populating the list.
• “Add an idea” feature within the horizontal kabab menu starts populating suggestions (e.g.- shoes from a catalogue) upon adding an idea within the list.

Insights:

• Most hypermarket/supermarket apps and website don’t really have the “shopping list” feature.
• “Our Groceries” which is especially for creating shopping lists is poorly designed and is un-intuitive.
• Amazon’s “shopping lists” feature is over engineered.

Observations about Carrefour’s shopping list feature.

The only other app that I found to have features on par with the “shopping list” feature in Carrefour was Amazon.

• Simple navigation to access “shopping list”, although Amazon’s “Lists” is slightly more intuitive to come across, when navigating through the mobile app.
• Unable to move items from cart to “shopping list” in carrefour app.
• Un-intuitive in terms of being able to add items to the shopping list. (first impressions)
• This flow : Shop now -> Categories -> Products -> Add to cart, is confusing, if the user is trying to add items to a shopping list and not to cart. (in a similar flow, Amazon’s app allows to add an item to a “shopping list” rather then adding it to cart.)

• Unable to move items from cart to “Lists”.
• Couldn’t locate shopping list on the desktop website.
• Assumed it to be a part of the “ways to shop” feature.

Discover

For the next steps I decided to create a questionnaire to conduct a survey, the things I kept in mind to prepare the set of questions was the Task, Insight, Deliverables and all the insights I learned from the above research so far. I also went on to design a persona, so that it can be streamlined with survey questions and my design helps to solve the problem of the said persona, in the given scenario.

Questionnaire :

I created a survey on Google survey and sent it out to 7 people to understand better the behaviour and expectations in our tasks context. Here’s a link with the questions and responses as well: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Jf5MM4xr1QqlQI2FHLIyaGuz7NmOzjgfIyghN9Qgr1M/edit#settings

Here’s a quick screenshot of the responses.

The research data suggested some interesting insights, in terms of user behaviour for when people do most of their shopping, what are the preferred channels, how do the manage a shopping list if any at all, a glimpse into their pain points in the context of managing/accommodating their shopping in a normal week.

I didn’t get enough time to conduct a user testing session into the carrefour app itself, to understand user frustration around the usability of“shopping list” feature. Ideally I would carry a user testing session around the flow of using a shopping list feature within the Carrefour app, but will leave that in the next iteration of this exercise.

On the basis of the user survey research data, some of the key points that I’ll consider in designing my solution will be:

• Give users a more practical solution which is instantly accessible to create, maintain and add items in a shopping list.
• Users tend to do shopping on the weekend, they add items to the list throughout the week, and go for in-store shopping over the weekend.

Develop

After this research exercise I went onto brainstorm some potential ideas that begin with identifying a flow, and doing a lo fidelity wireframe of that solution.

Flow for solution 1

The above flow is a more conservative approach towards one solution!

Deliver

A paper sketch showing a low fidelity design of how the potential flow will look on the screen.

Paper prototypes

Solution 2

A more dynamic solution that I stumbled upon during the brainstorm was to be able to create a “shopping list” or add items to a pre-existing list through a wearable tech like smart watch, the user can simply raise their wrist or smart phone to interact with Siri / Alexa or Google, the list can then be sync’d with the shopping list within the app, and based on shopping history, and analytics that shopping list can recommend a “Cart” ready to be checked out. This option can also be accessed using Siri, Alexa and Ok Google kind of personal assistant tech.

Summary

To conclude, there’s an array of design solutions that can be researched and tested to make the “shopping list” feature more interactive and successful, and the user testing is the best tool in this scenario, to understand the pain points of our user for whom this feature is being designed. For the scope of the task, I’ll leave it over here.

Thanks :)