Shopping for groceries is a ubiquitous part of our lifestyle, with many families shopping multiple times a week for food and other convenience items. However, the pandemic disrupted traditional patterns of shopping in person, leveraging pre-pandemic interest in disruptive business models relating to groceries, including services such as Peapod, Amazon Prime Pantry, and InstaCart. Many grocery stores now offer their own shopping and delivery services, making it possible to shop without ever setting foot in the store. What new experiences could the physical grocery store support that engage and delight the consumer? Grocery stores have been slow to adopt visible technological innovation, relying on traditional notions of travel through the store that maximize patron exposure. These shopping patterns include, for example, the “racetrack,” where patrons are forced to walk the entire perimeter of a store to locate the most common goods. Our goal is to understand the needs of the contemporary grocery shopper, channeling this knowledge to inform the design of a refined experience for grocery store patrons that maximizes meaningful, positive, and empowering embodied patterns of interaction in the physical store environment.
This was stage one of the design process. By getting the objective, our team was able to begin thinking of how to address the given problem. This was the launchpad for every further stage in the project and everything else in the documentation stems from this one objective.
We began by wanting to conduct research into the grocery store experience as a whole, so we could better understand our design space.
We each reviewed 2 articles on the internet related to grocery shopping and consumer experience at retail/grocery stores.
Background research was the first step we took to become more knowledgeable on information related to the product objective. During this, we had to take a broad scope of research because we had not yet narrowed down solution possibilities. By gaining knowledge from this research, we were able to know about common shopper problems and create more effective questions for our initial interviews.
We interviewed five people, 1 per team member. We audio-recorded these interviews for future reference.