The Grocery Shopping Experience
The Flying Monkey Application for Young Children
Although I had a hand in every aspect of this project, I was the main lead in multiple ideation sessions, conducted the usability testing (with two 6-year-olds), and redesigned the end solution. This is one of my first-ever UX projects.
Project Brief
During the duration of three weeks, we were tasked to change the shopping experience in teams of four. We were given the location, but no problem...
The Goal
Refine people’s grocery shopping trip experience based on understanding contemporary customers’ needs to increase the sales of the store. By entering the solution on the interaction between the user and environment, maximizing embodied, positive interactions that take advantage of space and place. The solution should be easy and inexpensive to implement.
The Timeline
We divided up all the work we would be doing for the four weeks, into four sections.
The Design Process
PRIMARY RESEARCH
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STORYTELLING
SECONDARY RESEARCH
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UI DESIGN
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RESEARCH ANALYSIS
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COMMUNICATION
DESIGN
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Observations
It was important to understand some of the current pain points of the grocery shopping experience. We started out with observations, at a Fresh Thyme. On many visits, we started to notice a theme of disconnect between parent and child. Many times we would see kids on electronic devices and not actively experience the environment around them. This led to secondary research on the importance of children in the grocery shopping experience.
We identified this as a possible pain point for the family experience as a whole. interviews were conducted based on this. The demographics of the interviews ranged from workers to parents of children who go grocery shopping.
Interview Results
Both workers and the parents have had good experiences with kids in the grocery store environment, and their opinions about kids’ engagement were generally positive. However, bringing kids to grocery stores definitely can be chaotic, and grocery shopping is not always pleasing for the kids. A common solution for this is keeping the kids busy by providing them snacks which, according to our interviewees, is not an ideal method. One of the parents mentioned that grocery shopping could be an educational opportunity.
This was one of many positions for kids to sit in as they entertained themselves, while the adult shopped.
Based on initial observations, we decided to look into how the child affects the grocery shopping experience and general data about the experience.
After finding supporting evidence for this pain point, we made a core problem:
Promote children (3-6 years old) engagement during family grocery shopping to improve the families' overall experience.
Influence 43% of Parental Purchases
54% of User Use a Phone at the Store
Average of 41 Minutes in a Store
Pulling insights from the observations, interviews, and literature research we formed two types of personas (the parent and the child).
These Personas would help solidify our ideas later.
We also created a rough journey map to see where the kid affected the grocery experience. This is when we realized that they affect every aspect of it and that to change the entire journey would be very challenging. Thus, we tried to narrow down the single point we were going to try and affect (which would be the time of the actual shopping).
We started our ideation at a fairly early stage of our project. As soon as we did some secondary research and set the core, we started to generate random ideas in our minds. We did a snowballing idea activity, where we threw out the craziest ideas possible and didn't judge those ideas until no other ideas were left. A discussion on feasibility, effectiveness, potential problems, and the implementation in the grocery store helped narrow down the ideas.
This led to our final idea of an AR animation idea-combining with a shopping list challenge, called Flying Monkey.
Usability Test
A usability test was conducted with two six-year-olds, and their mother to see if the prototype we had put together was pleasant to use. We wanted them to be able to use the app and have an effective and efficient experience. In the end, we wanted some way to gauge if this app would increase the kid's and parents' experience in the grocery store.
One of the key insights that were found during the testing was the children loved clicking the monkey. Animation and visual aspects would be useful to keep the kid's attention while educating them. This became a game to click monkeys, the only dilemma that will have to be thought about is if there is more than one kid. It also became evident that there was too much text-based onboarding, thus more images were used. As seen below the design of Flying Monkey changed as more data came to light.
To help finalize the design of Flying Monkey we put the personas in an ideal situation.
Sketches (low-fidelity)
Paper Prototyping
This was a cheap-and-easy way to help shape our being brainstorming sessions, and also helped user feel more at easy expressing feelings and experiences. As they felt they could modify the prototype.
Final Design
This is the different screens that could appear, depending on what was clicked.
After this design process, we decided to focus on the AR animation idea combined with the shopping list challenge, called Flying Monkey.
What is Flying Monkey?
Flying Monkey is an educational animation app. As stated in research and observations many (54%) of users use their phone at the grocery store, thus taking this data and using it to our advantage. This application lets parents input their grocery list beforehand, and once at the store, the kids will scan the bar codes of items. Once the bar codes are scanned, a flying monkey will appear on the screen. Once tapped he will give you an educational fact and give you a point.
What if the Kid Scan Something Not on the List?
A prompt will pop up asking the kid, to get permission from their parent to put it in the shopping list/cart. This is to help promote parent interaction during the trip.
What Incentives the Kid?
Not only is the monkey animated, and kids have fun poking its belly, but at the end of the grocery experience, they can get a prize from the cashier (at the grocery store's discretion).