Background review
User research
Brainstorming
Create storyboards
Low-fi iterations
High-fi design

Most of us have faced the moment when we cannot locate a product quickly, or give up on buying a thing due to the lack of information. How can we make the current shopping experience more enjoyable? Also, with so many competitors in the market (Amazon, Walmart, Giant, etc.) How can a retailer really stand out?

Solution

We designed a "smart shopping experience" leveraging the advantage of online shopping:

• Collaborative shopping lists
• Easy navigation & product information checking powered by an on-cart shopping assistant tablet
• Simplified check-out process

Target grocery business waiting to be developed

1%

Share of the grocery market

Target has decided to boost its grocery business

130

New stores focusing on grocery were opened in 2019 in one city

The grocery business has potential

75%

 Target shoppers in stores are adding at least one food item to their baskets

Sources: Cheng, 2019 ;Grocerydive, 2019

4. Together, these info helped us to decide on the high-level goals

Affinity mapping helps us to identify, and make sure we won't miss any important common theme from notes of the interviewee's observation and user's behavior.

Step 4. Consolidating models (Click pictures to see its full-version)

We synthesized and consolidated individual models to help the team collect, incorporate, and use the data we got.  Each model communicates the data and highlights the key insights.

Referring to online shopping experiences, we found that these identified issues are inherent cons of physical shopping.

Online shopping leverages technologies to reduce customers' burden by providing: high accessibility to critical information, convenient search function, easy check-out method, additional info that helps users to make smart decisions, etc.

So, is there a way for us to add these qualities to physical shopping as well? We believe it is possible. But first, we need to decide: in what form and on what kind of platform will these new qualities be added. We came up with four ideas:

Interactive kiosks

It could be helpful but will require users to take extra effort to find the kiosk. In the research, not all users can find the scan machine when they want to check the price of an item.

Improve the Target app

Through the research we’ve already found that people do not carry mobile phones in their hand when shopping. Voice tech can be helpful in terms of navigating but can’t fulfill all the needs.

On-cart tablet

This idea is believed to be the best one as it has the potential to address all the issues in our findings. Although one might argue that it can be costly, we don’t need such a device mounted on all carts — just a few for shoppers who need them most (who need to buy a lot of things, want to finish buying in a short time).

Due to time and resource constraints, we didn’t get to test with users. However, we have got solid user data during the research phase and have immersed in it, which helped us to perform cognitive walkthroughs and used the heuristic evaluation technique to test our design during each round.

As it has been mentioned in the brainstorming section, the tablet leverages the pros of digital shopping and applies it to physical shopping. That said, the interaction mode would be different from either physical shopping or online shopping that most people are used to. In this way, we were very careful when designing any new kind of interactions that might conflict with the users’ mental model or might require a long learning curve. Throughout the process, the most challenging part was to design for the “scanning” interaction.

When using the tablet to do this kind of self-service shopping, users have to scan the item they want to buy to put it into the system, so that they can make a payment later on. However, checking product information also requires users to scan the item. In that way, the action “scan” can actually lead to two different outcomes, which could be confusing to shoppers if not addressed well. We came up with several different ideas to deal with it:

1. Let shoppers decide: Ask users to whether to add the item into the cart or that they just want to check the info (X)

2. “Scan” leads to different outcomes based on users’ shopping list: if the scanned item is in the list it will be added into the cart after being scanned. (X)

3. Separate “Scan” and “Check info” function: All item scanned will be added to the cart by default (users can remove it whenever they want to) Add an additional page for checking info (✓)

Thank you for reading!