Thinking about design for “substitutes” in food shopping

When you shop online at Sainsbury’s, you are in fact giving one of our colleagues a shopping list that they will use to go around a store nearby, picking the items you want off the shelves on your behalf.

A “Zebra” handset used to scan items from a shelf

Sometimes, your “personal shopper” can’t find the thing you want on the shelf in the store they’re in. So (and with your permission) they will try to “substitute” it for something else if they can. Just like you might if you were in that store and found that they had run out Heinz ketchup. You might choose Crosse & Blackwell instead.

While many substitutes can be fine, others aren’t and this can be a disappointment to you, particularly if you were relying on them for a specific recipe.

It’s also worth saying that the faster the personal shoppers can work to get your basket together and onto a van to your house, the better.

But with speed comes mistakes, and with mistakes (mayonnaise instead of ketchup?) comes more disappointment. And if you say you don’t want substitutes, is “all or nothing” acceptable for something you were relying on having, like milk, for example?

It’s a tricky business.

So there’s a trade-off between the benefit of choice on the website, and the problem of substitution in the store. For better or worse, at Sainsbury’s we think people appreciate choice more.

Identifying “totes” (boxes) for delivery

But from the point of view of design for web or mobile, how do we know we are correct in our assumption that the benefit of choice outweighs the problems of substitution? How do we know whether our customers even think about the issue at all (until it happens to them)?

As designers, it’s worth asking ourselves these questions because, regardless of whether the business implements “micro fulfilment” or “dark stores” to improve the issue, unless what appears on line can be guaranteed to be available, then there will always be the issue of comprehension and mitigation in the event of disappointment.

And if UX design does anything at all, it should try to protect the customer from bad things.

Have a look at some of the other things that the team have been up to:

How our Digital Team helped Feed the Nation, and what we learned

Find more examples of work from our talented colleagues, via our work page.