Improving the user experience of online grocery shopping using Design Thinking process— A Case Study about Franprix
What are we talking about ?
First, let’s put some context.
Two of my fellow UX designers colleagues and I were mandated by Franprix, a French grocery store chain of Casino Group, to improve the usability and desirability of their online platform. First, we assessed the current situation and tried to understand how Franprix users are currently using the service and what are their biggest frustrations. Then, we found a concept that could answer the pain points raised during user interviews.
Due to Covid situation, we had to work on this project remotely, and it actually allowed us finding collaborative online tools that work very well 🤙
If you’re not interested in reading our process entirely, you can go directly at the end of this article to watch the solution we came up with. That being said, I really encourage you to follow our journey through user research and ideation as it is the most exciting for a UX designer.
Some market research about online grocery shopping
According to Matthieu Meheut, international marketer in FMCG and retail industries : “Online grocery shopping will probably not become the default, as shopping is an entertainment activity for some consumers and shops are a socialisation place. Although, for growing online shopping, I can there are two major hurdles. Firstly, a product availability close to 100% (how frustrating is it when something you order isn’t delivered because of shortage). Secondly, price parity with physical shopping, as a shopper will always consider their time spent shopping as free time, so no reason for being charged for saving this time.”
For the market research specialist Licia Allara, “the highest barrier today is that we still love to see, touch and pick food ourselves; we are not driven by pure convenience when we do food shopping”
Well, this starts pretty bad … Let’s see what the actual users have to say about it.
Who are our users ?
In order to have a first understanding of our users, we performed and recorded 5 user interviews.
The interviewees are from 26 to 50 years old, living all around Europe and with different job status. Nevertheless, they have have something in common : they all love to cook and enjoy grocery shopping.
Well, maybe it’s not the only thing in common.
During these interviews, we tried to understand their feelings about their experience on grocery shopping platforms, what they like, what they wish they could do, and of course, what they dislike.
After this interviewing sessions and without any analysis yet, we could already detect patterns and recurring frustrations. But for now, let’s try to gather and synthesize all these information in order to have a clearer overview of the situation.
Synthesizing Data
In order to gather the mass of information coming from both primary and secondary research, we used a very powerful visualization tool called Affinity Diagram. We wrote down any piece of data, whether it’s a verbatim or a rephrase of something we heard during interviews. Then we sorted and labelled them into categories in order to get actionable insights.
Here is a piece of what it looked like.
At this point, we were able to have a clear overview of the situation. We managed to sort our data into 14 categories, from “availability of products” to “personalized shopping”.
However, we already noticed an emphasis on one specific matter : difficulty to find inspiration while shopping online.
Indeed, let’s see some quotes taken directly from the user interviews :
“Online shopping is not adapted to people who follow their desires when shopping”
“Shopping online is not intuitive at all”
“ I love to go shopping, being able to choose and moving around the shelves”
“I’m not guided through categories that correspond to my needs, it’s up to me to have imagination”
Getting into the shoes of our users
There it is ! Our user’s main frustration when it comes to grocery shopping online is the fact that they can’t find inspiration as they would in real life.
At this point, we were really able to really understand our users and come up with the problem statement as follows :
People who enjoy grocery shopping and cooking, need a way to find inspiration for their menus while shopping, because they don’t feel guided online as they would be between the shelves of a physical store.
Then, to help us empathize even more and to summarize all the research we did this far, we used a visualization and storytelling tool called User journey map. It allowed us to picture the process our users go through in order to accomplish their main goal, and spot the main pain points during this journey.
Thanks to this tool, we could understand how the solution would fit within the context of our user’s life. In order to help them finding inspiration on Franprix’s online platform, we need to do something around the browsing of categories. Ok … but what ?
Let’s get crazy
It’s now time to move onto the ideation phase, in order to find a solution that suits our food lovers in lack of inspiration.
In order to get the first obvious (and often mediocre) solutions out of our heads, we did 3 rounds of “Crazy 8” each, individually.
Never heard of Crazy 8 ? Well it’s a pretty amazing tool where each member of the team puts a timer and, within 8 minutes, have to come up with 8 ideas using rapid sketching.
We ended up with 72 solutions
Believe me, a lot of them were really, really bad ideas… But it enabled us to see a lot more possibilities than we may have ever considered before.
After gathering all our stunning works of art, (this was a lot of fun) we were able to start a conversation and mix some of our ideas together in order to find THE SOLUTION. 💡
Here is a (very bad) picture of the storyboard of our final solution.
It’s funny to see how, thanks to Crazy 8, our first ideas turned out to be the worst, and our craziest ideas, ended up being the best and the ones we prototyped.
Thanks to this new “consumer profile” feature, our users will be able to enter all their consuming habits in terms of preferences, allergies, special diets … They will then be offered a lot of inspiration tips such as recipes or carts inspired by chefs or people that have a close consumer profile to theirs.
Because our solution is to add the consumer profile and the different solutions that it generates, we decided not to spend time on designing the creation of the consumer profile as it makes more sense to test the functionality itself, if users like it or not, before spending time on creating the consumer profile.
We heard you, dear users !
Now that we had the solution to our users problem, and after realizing a quick user flow to depict the primary ways our users will interact with the product, it was now time to wireframe.
Let’s see how the final Mid-Fi Wireframe looks like being used.
Content is written in French as our testers were French
If you want to dig into more details , you can find the prototype here.
Usability testing and next steps
This prototype was tested by 5 different users.
The usability testing sessions were very insightful and allowed us to spot major issues such as :
- The consumer profile which was the starting point of this whole functionality is not that relevant. Our users at the end just want to find inspiration, whether it comes from a chef, or from someone who has the same consuming habits.
- The page “La Surprise du Chef” with which you can look at the cart made by a chef, is their favorite innovation as it is original and gives a certain power of authority and legitimacy.
Fortunately, these tests also reassured us on the fact that we did a good job at understanding our users and their frustrations when it comes to finding inspiration online. Indeed they all had the feeling to reach this goal after using our prototype.
Because of that and if we were to continue on this project, here are the two main directions that we would take :
- Develop the “Recipes” part, as we realized that it was, all the time, the first card they clicked on, saying that it was mainly when looking at recipes that they found inspiration and desire to cook.
- Then, we would also develop “La surprise du chef” and particularly improve the search system, whether it’s to find a new chef or a recipe, or even products from the whole shop.
What I like about Design Thinking Process
During this project which was my first project as a UX Designer, I really realized how the Design Thinking process is a soft science.
I love nuances and relativity. It’s very cool to know that the tools we use are flexible and that depending on how you use them and for what purpose, it will mean something different.
I also realized how much creativity is not something you’re born with but more a continuous learning. The ideation tools are a good example of how crazy creative you can be as soon as you’re out of your comfort zone.
I can’t wait to get more and more thrilling projects, and be able, one day, to get to bed at night thinking “I may have actually helped someone today ?”
Thanks for reading !
