Initial Thoughts

Process

Our starting point was identifying the pain points of using other grocery and delivery apps. 

But before understanding the issues that grocery and delivery apps brought, I had to investigate who was using these apps in the first place. After, I wanted to better understand who used grocery and delivery apps. I wanted to ask what made users want to use these apps in the first place. I also wanted to better understand why they would choose either option of going to a grocery market instead or using an app to cut down time and simplify this action. In the context of these points of interest, I created a qualitative survey to learn more about user motivations.

Initial Survey Findings

My survey yielded 24 responses (N=24).Examining the data, I found that:

• Users were put off by the high delivery costs

• Current grocery delivery apps aren’t able to maximize efficiency in delivery times and scheduling

• Inventory was typically limited

From the user interviews I conducted, some notable remarks from participants were:

“Service fees are too high, fees almost make the entire order double in total price. I wish scheduling delivery time options were also more flexible.”

“The orders were sometimes misunderstood and either too much or too little of an item was acquired. For some foods certain brands are preferred so it would be ideal to add additional details or expand on specific qualities that I want in the groceries.”

“There are limited menus or limited restaurants. Also not as good quality as in person dining.”

I wanted to address these concerns in the development of Handover by:

• Streamlining the accessible savings and features, like the coupon book, for the user to be more prominent, visible, and accessible.

• Incorporating delivery scheduling to be a part of the user flow

• Giving users the ability to shop from multiple stores to account for issues of limited inventories.

Competitive Analysis

In order to make a competitively working and strong product, I conducted an analysis of other grocery and food delivery apps along with several papers on their social impact and conducted a survey to learn more about how users felt along with their experiences of any food delivery and grocery apps they used.

The 7 of the most downloaded delivery apps: Doordash, Instacart, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Postmates, Fantuan Delivery, and Walmart, shared common qualities and design models that made them successful and effective. I cross-compared their features to establish baseline functionality of a grocery delivery app while taking note of their definitive features that made them unique in the mobile app delivery market. 

I, along with my team, cross compared and examined the common features belonging to the apps we used as reference and study material to establish base functionality for a fully operating app. From the data we recorded, we came across 24 notable features common across those 7 apps.. Across these 24 ideas, 12 features made it through to establish a baseline standard grocery delivery app. 

I desired 2 solutions set apart from those original 12 ideas to give our app personality and fulfill the concerns of our user research findings.

After conducting user interviews about these apps, I narrowed down the issues that each application had and measured them with the issues that I wanted to solve.

Results & Analysis

I separated users’ responses into thought processes in navigation and their opinions and feelings regarding their experience using Handover.

Here is where I learned how important it is to take a step back from the project you’re designing or developing. Without these user tests, we would not have learned how difficult balancing business goals along with improvements in design is.

Findings

I found that:

Increasing the areas of access towards coupons and instant savings regarding their order convinced users to continue browsing and shopping for groceries. We organized and tied savings and coupon cards to store specific interfaces to able to test.

Participants felt that the Budget Summary and Favorites Listing tools available to them in the app addressed the concerns of tediousness in shopping or browsing through many listings for the items they want.

The ability to shop and receive an order composed of selections from multiple stores absolved the users’ concerns about limited inventory selections without having to worry about submitting multiple orders.

In conclusion, having to manually access these savings proved to be a worthwhile change to implement in the product design of a grocery delivery app. Yet, it begs to ask why we didn’t just make the savings automatically apply. And as we tested, we also found that having the feedback loop that these savings do exist instead of automatically being applied validates the user. Based on their response to an automatic application, the user operates based off of the assumption that these savings are or aren’t applied. Visibility was the key player in solving that issue of curbing high costs in ordering and processing.
The Budget Summary tool proved to be helpful to users who wanted to make shopping for groceries effectively by seeing what their budget can break down into in terms of categorizing their own selection. These tools reduced the amount of time shopping and browsing with all the relevant information they require to shop being brought up to them in one frame.

Including the option to be able to submit a single order curating items from multiple stores proved to be effective at addressing users’ concerns about limited inventory. However, this brought up a further development in that user participants became concerned about how to make the business model more effective and worthwhile for workers and drivers as compared to the overall app design.