Amazon Everyday — Mobile application for daily essentials
Problem space:
Amazon Prime Now has thousands of products available at a moment’s notice, hand-delivered to your anticipatory arms. Need milk packets delivered to your doorstep for your morning coffee? Easy. Need a new set of earphones for the gym? Consider it done.
Online grocery apps have made our lives less demanding in more than one ways and has touched our normal life too.There are several advantages of ordering groceries online:
- one can browse the virtual shopping aisles 24/7 without leaving the comfort of the sofa making it convenient.
- can avoid crowds and parking queues.
- with a wide delivery window to choose from, seven days a week, one can easily fit their grocery shopping around other commitments.
Launched as a grocery delivery app, we see a variety of other products like daily essentials, groceries, electronics, home decor etc. Talking about daily essentials how often do we need to buy earphones or a rug? This makes the current user experience for grocery shopping often confusing and frustrating as the paradox of choice: abundant choice always makes for misery. Seeing the vast amount of products is overwhelming and can cause people to waste a lot more time and away from things they enjoy or value. Increasing the stress of choice decreases shopping time.
Source: Google Images
Solution:
Rethinking the grocery shopping experience, Amazon Everyday is a grocery shopping tool that helps users quickly and easily shop and purchase groceries online. The application understands the needs and intentions of the users of the application and makes it relatively frictionless for them to complete desired actions.
The application is self explanatory such that there is no learning curve. The user opens the application ; browses various food categories and searches for specific items. He adds some bananas, milk, cottage cheese and some cheese to his shopping cart and proceeds to check out. Before proceeding to pay he can either sign up or check out as guest. The advantage of signing up/logging is to store shipping and payment information for checking out quickly in the future. He reviews his purchase details, schedules the delivery time at the desired address and makes payment. After placing the order he can track the delivery person when the order is out for delivery.
The goal was to make the application self evident, so that by looking at it the average user will know what it is and how to use it. I have also focused on words and phrases that seem to match the task at hand so that the user will feel smarter and more in control which will bring him/her back.
User Research:
Good design is a data driven process. Hence the first step of the design cycle involved understanding the user and tasks. To understand the problem space I carried out generative (formative) research by conducting surveys and personal interviews to collect user data. The goal was to understand user behaviour, perceptions, attitudes and feelings; in other words to build empathy with the user.
Following are the key findings from my research:
1.Key points of experience with current Amazon Now:
- UI is not good.
- Cannot find half of the regular products.
- Products are not sorted.
- Too many options to choose from
“Right now it is rather chaotic, cluttered, badly organised and repetitive.”
This called for a spin off of Amazon Now called Amazon Everyday which aims to deliver daily essentials only and be focused upon guiding users to complete their goals with clearly signposted decision making tools.
2. While 57% people agreed that shopping groceries online saves time,28% people believed that shopping on the internet is difficult. The overriding concern of all users I interviewed was time and convenience. Anything that helped them save time and was easy to use was welcomed with open arms.
This finding emphasised the importance of need of clear, consistent and simplified navigation and easy order placement in real time to make it relatively frictionless to achieve goals.
3. With the survey results I discovered that 71% of people bought groceries from the supermarket. To understand more about why people preferred retail stores, I interviewed some of them as well. The key findings were:
- Shopping online lacks the experience of retail shopping.
- Online stores do not mention how old the produce is.
This information made me conclude that the app needs to be personalised to end users on an individual basis.
Link to my interview data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rLVvKERRU31tBfPB6DGhUPcsUt_Tzm1fQv6AvLoOKiI/edit?usp=sharing
Usability heuristic analysis:
I used Jacob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics for user interface design to evaluate how Amazon Now’s competition compares with standards in usability and the overall experience.
Finding out what worked well or poorly on the following 3 applications (Big basket, Grofers and the existing Amazon Now) saved me from implementing features that are useless; this analysis provided insights on what features the users actually need.
This concluded that that Amazon Now is lacking behind on almost all the 10 principles of usability analysis.
Empathy maps and Personas:
Distilling raw data into useful information primarily for feature creation strategies, such as what feature fit the user needs, I created personas transforming the user into concrete people rather than elastic. Empathy maps helped outline what the users are thinking, feeling and what are their aspirations and worries.
Both the personas are from the first empathy map. Empathy map two is to be explored later.
Lean UX and MVP:
Adopting the Lean UX approach, I went on to build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), tailored to fit build-measure-learn cycle. Lean UX starts with finding solution to the problem and then measuring the feedbacks and enhancing the previous solutions based on these feedbacks.The core objective is to focus on obtaining feedback as early as possible so that it can be used to make quick decisions.
Ditching “requirements” and using “problem statements” led to a set of assumptions which helped me build the MVP.
User Stories:
Based on the findings from research, specifically personas I created user stories which were about problems and not solutions. I wrote user stories in the form of — As a user, I want to {goal} so that {motivation}.
The color indicates what goes in which version/sprint ( green=1, yellow=2, pink=3, red=4 ) and also the importance for each persona has been marked.
Information Architecture:
In order to figure out the site structure I conducted an online card sort using an online card sorting tool called Optimalsort. The goal of this card sort was to learn the concepts users use to group things and the language they use to describe things. Using the user stories I made 30 cards and four users were asked to create groups of similar tasks. On comparing the groupings they made and the language they used to describe the group I came up with a set of categories that best fits the way users think about the information space. Some of the common headers were : product details, profile, cart, payment, search, delivery. This set of categories became by information architecture. The similarity matrix below shows the percentage of participants who agree with each card pairing.
Site map:
Using the same information I made a site map for the application which gave a clearer picture of the navigational hierarchy. It helped me organise content into sections.
User flows:
Users land on apps to achieve a specific goal; they have an objective that should be identified and designed for. While designing the user flows the focus was on what the user needs to get done and how to deliver that in the most effective manner possible. Analysing of user flows allowed me to examine every aspect of the task, to make it quicker and easier.
There are three various scenarios I considered while making the user flows:
Case 1: The complete user flow
Case 2: User wants to buy products on offer
Case 3: User wants to buy frozen peas which may lie in two categories : vegetables and frozen food
Case 4: User wants to buy with a shopping list
Checkout flows :
Wireframes
Concluding all the above information, I started sketching the wireframes which helped me generate a lot of ideas. After n number of iterations I began working on high-fidelity wireframes on Sketch.
My main focus in this stage was to create a clear hierarchy on each page. I also tried taking advantage of conventions and reduced noise level of the page, making the useful content more prominent.
Usability Testing:
Objective:
This test was conducted for the analysis of the quality of a user’s experience and to identify usability barriers when interacting with the “Amazon Everyday” mobile application.
Methodology:
Four users tested the mobile application out of which two were of “Impatient Sarah” persona type, between 25–30 years in age. They come from various backgrounds including business development and software development. The participants had the experience of using mobile apps for ordering groceries. They all are medium to heavy internet users.
2 out of 4 users tested the application through shared link while 2 were tested in-person.
The users were asked to perform the following tasks:
- buy a product ( The time taken was recorded for this process)
- search and buy couple of products
- buy using product categories
Findings and Recommendations:
- The test showed that the user’s were able to achieve their goals successfully using the application.They felt that the application was easy to use. The participants strongly felt that they used minimal amount of effort and time to carry out the tasks on the application. The total time taken to buy a product was 1 minute.The participants faced no confusion with the meaning of words.
- With regard to specifics, one participant had a problem with the cart screen. The participant wanted to continue shopping after checking the cart and there was no clarity how to shop again. To rectify this issue the “back button” on cart screen was changed to “close button” so that the user can check and close the cart at any point of shopping. With this improvement, if a user is in product categories page he/she can open the cart, check cart and close the cart and will be back to the product categories page again automatically.
- There were some confusions caused by the limited amount of buttons being actionable due to prototype limitations.
Visual Design:
It can be jarring when a website or product we interact with on a regular basis suddenly makes a major change to its visual design as we had gotten used to. I took light inferences from the current app and worked on it’s strengths.The brand colours have been pretty convincing and relevant even after decades of it’s existence. However, I tweaked the shades of yellow and blue to give the app a fresher look.
Style guide:
Prototype:
Using invision I built the prototype for the application. You can check out the prototype here: https://invis.io/TGNYDI2ENJQ#/318876777_Home_
Conclusion:
It was a great opportunity working on this project out of which I learned a lot. The goal was to make the application self-evident so that by looking at it, the average use will know what it is, how to use it and accomplish goals with fastest time possible. The unique experiences will allow users to connect to the brand and they are likely to keep coming back for more purchases.
There are certain things that I learnt which I want to highlight:
1.Who, when, what, where, how of the user’s goals is the key.
2. Analysis is as important as the user research.
3. Iterate.Test.Iterate.Test. The learning never ends.
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mail to : ushawadhwani@gmail.com
