Introduction
With incremental living and academic pressure, college students have to shrink their time and money on some lower-priority routines. Grocery shopping is one of them. The problem is it will negatively affect students’ health conditions.
Therefore, the goal of this product is to help students be more cost-efficient in both time and money spent on grocery shopping.
My goal is to see the shopping habits of college students to learn their living and spending habits. Grocery shopping is necessary for college students and the portion of spending and time cost on that is relatively large. I aim to design a tool that helps students be more efficient in grocery shopping.
Contextual Inquiry
I planned to observe how the participants made the following decision:
Purchasing online or offline.
Which store to choose
Which brand to choose for the same product.
I will conduct the observation by following her to do the grocery shopping and do the video recording if get her authorization • Three follow-up questions:
Why did you choose (_shopping online/offline_) instead of (_shopping online/offline_)? (Based on which the participant chooses)
What makes you decide on purchasing this product/brand.
What is the problem you face during the grocery shopping
Goal
Plan
I was not surprised that the participant would purchase in more than one store. However, I am surprised by the result that she did not take the BOGO deal, which is what I usually take. If I could conduct the observation again, I would be interested in seeing how the participant would act on shopping when she was doing the grocery with her roommates. It would be interesting to see the difference between those situations and curious about how the companion contributes to the decision-making process.
Lesson Learned
To identify college students’ basic needs, I need to further learn about their definition of “effective grocery shopping”. Furthermore, students’ motivations for doing effective grocery shopping.
Interview
1. How often do you do the grocery shopping?
2. Do you think you are effective every time doing grocery shopping? — immediately follow the next one.
3. What do you mean by “effective”?
4. Why do you want to be effective?
5. What do you think is the barrier for you to be effective?
6. What are the biggest challenges when you want to buy a product? For example, if you wanna buy cream cheese, how would you make the decision?
Sketching
Persona
Sketch 1 - Review Pool
Sketch2 - Sales Around You
Sketch3 - Share Anyone 🙋?
Evaluation
The test is conducted remotely. The user is asked to find any information they need to share/purchase a bulk-sale item. The purpose is to test the usability of the interface and architecture.
a. Change the font and style to reduce distraction.
b. Provide a short and clear context in each section to allow users to know what they can achieve.
c. Reduce the work in the Create section by changing some of the blank filling space to the select menu. For example, changing the blank space of “You Need to pay” section to the number-only keyboard; “Available Until” blank space to Date and time pickers. “Delivery Option” blank space to radio button.
Optimization
Test Summary
This Sharing Request functionality focus on dealing with the problem that students always feel overwhelmed with bulk sales. This design provides users a way to share surplus, eliminating waste. Users could use it to either post a sharing request or respond to a request(viewing the sharer’s contact information).
