— Enhancing overall experience for future shopping
If you think about Grocery shopping, the entire process has been pretty much unchanged for hundreds of years. You walk into a place that has rows of products on shelves. You pick out what you want and then you pay. It’s really not that much different today than it was a hundred years ago. Although we have all the technology our disposal, the shopping experience has not advanced with the times. The retail concept that needs to change to align with future generations. In order to get there, insights in the consumer and its behavior are of great importance. The future shopping would mainly on the experience of buying products. A lot of grocery shoppers still experience inconveniences in finding products, deciding which one to buy, getting discounts and spending time in checkout lines. A good retail concept is created by aligning the shopping experience with consumer needs.
Problem Statement:
How can we improve in store grocery shopping experience for people?
In this project, we present “Amazon Go Plus” a smartphone application which solves some of the major problems faced by shoppers. We integrate existing technologies and services to create a novel solution which will help people to save time, money and create a memorable shopping experience.
Research：
Semi-structured interview and Literature review
We conducted some informal interviews and contextual inquiries with some students at IUPUI to find out about their hardships and needs when they go grocery shopping. We also did some literature review and studied reports by government agencies on grocery shopping to get an idea of the current shopping trends. Based on the data gathered, we created personas as well as overall user journey and experience maps. This helped us to understand the goals, motivations and pain points of the user so that we could design a better solution for them.
Findings
The major problems and needs are listed as follows:
- Users end up spending too much time in the grocery store especially in things such as finding items and standing in checkout lines.
- Users want to see the reviews of items and compare the features and prices.
- Users want to save money by finding discounted products.
- Users want to know how much they are spending and compare quality with price in other stores.
Functional Design Concepts
The main functions for our project are as follows:
● Checking on sale goods: By embedded AR technology, users are able to check the on sale goods intuitively.
● Locating goods: To facilitate users find stuffs in large shopping environment, this feature, embedded AR technology, will help users easily find stuffs that they are looking for.
● Product review: Facilitate and help users to make decisions while shopping by connecting with amazon reviews.
● Transparent prices: From business perspective, Amazon prime customers are able to get the lowest price by “price match”. Others who are not Amazon prime customers are able to compare the price of the same good in other store and get the location information that embedded with google map.
Early Ideation and Sketches
Prototype
Further Design Wish lists
- Having delivery of goods by including drones or other means of transportation.
- Making the app available on microsoft hololens or google glass for more immersive AR experience with less distraction.
- Auto suggesting products based on history.
- Creating a map with directions according to the list of items to buy.
- Sorting and searching on based of ingredients and contents.
- Connecting with home refrigerator to show which items are about to expire and should be bought.
Summary and Thoughts
This project mainly focus on concept design of grocery store shopping experience. It is based on “Amazon go”’s shopping concept, we added other features upon “Amazon go” based on user research to enhance the overall shopping experience. We conducted several contextual inquires with the prototypes. We had a valuable experience of testing with actual users in the actual environment this application is designed to be used.
One limitation of our project would be that the AR technology was not implemented in our prototype. Therefore, we had to ask the participants to act as if the prototype had the AR feature. If our prototype could have incorporated the technology, it would have led to more discoveries on potential problems our prototype may have. Another limitation is that our participants for testing were mostly young adults. We do not have results from elders, who may be less familiar with AR technology than the participants we tested the prototype with.
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