Introduction
MapMe is a grocery shopping system integrated with users’ smartphones and shopping carts to help them improve their shopping efficiency and experience.
UX Designer
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Sketch, Invision, Illustrator
Role
Product Design 2019
Tool
Overview
MapMe can integrate with any grocery store smartphone app, and users could have a great experience creating a list, syncing with the smart shopping cart, following a responsive “Bird’s-Eye View” map and navigation line to find items, displaying real-time coupon and sale information, and finishing shopping quicker and more enjoyable.
Motivation
Shoppers are usually crisscrossing grocery stores while shopping. The reason, of course, is because they have difficulty finding every last item or forgetting to pick up items along their way.
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A recent Gallup Poll shows that 82% of US adults go grocery shopping in a grocery store at least once a week (Jones, 2019). Through our research and interviews during our design process, we also found that relatively everyone wants to see coupons and sales information while they shop. When all these ideas present, it was an excellent opportunity for us to find a better solution to help improve grocery shopping efficiency.
Formative Study
Design Process
To better understand our possible design solution and narrow down our target audience, we used the following methods and timeline to realize the design of our product.
Our group engaged in an iterative design process to explore various concepts by utilizing different research methods, such as a culture probe and user enactments, before generating our final physical prototype. Below are the fundamental processes and results in our design.
Observation
The most important finding in observation was that many shoppers seem to backtrack, walk in circles, or zigzag across the store as they fill up their carts, which is not very efficient. This helped validate our initial motivations for the design.
Culture Probe
To better understand participants’ experience in the grocery store. We asked participants to complete three parts: creating a photo journal during a shopping trip, completing an activity booklet after a trip, and completing a follow-up interview with our team.
Insights from culture probe:
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Participants were not worried about finding something because they usually visit the same grocery store and also comfortable asking for directions if they can’t find something.
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Participants would like to know if something they want to buy is out of stock.
These results helped to better define our target audience and shift the direction of our design. Rather than a turn-by-turn GPS-like system, we’re focusing on showing shoppers where items on their list are as they move through stores.
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Young adults who grocery shop regularly
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Shoppers who shop at the same store each trip
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Smartphone users, especially those who use grocery store apps
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Prefer to shop with a digital list
Target Audience
User Enactments
Before conducting our user enactments, we listed several research questions regarding interface preference, navigation method, substitute suggestions and so on, to focus our research and better design and experiment with user enactments. We also chose five scenarios to simulate for shedding light on potential design opportunities.
Insights from user enactments:
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Participants prefer the simplistic birds-eye view of the store with markers for list items, rather than turn-by-turn navigation to each item, and a search bar/item look-up with the phone as an interface.
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Participants were eager to see a coupon system integrated with the application list that offers personalized discounts when at the store.
These results helped to understand user needs better and generate two crucial opportunities for our design.
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Birds-Eye View
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Coupon System integrated with the shopping list.
System Concept
Key Features
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List Creation: MapMe allows users to create or add to a shopping list at any time.
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QR Code: MapMe lets users scan a QR code to pair their phone with a smart shopping cart which has a Bluetooth sensor in it.
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“Bird’s-Eye” view: after syncing with the cart, the users’ phone interface will show the location of all the items that users added in their list as well as the user themselves.
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Coupon Integration: MapMe will automatically integrate coupons with the list so that users could see if there is any discount on the items they’re buying.
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Navigation: MapMe will give users navigation lines towards items, but only when users ask for it.
Experience Prototyping
The basic interaction within mobile is creating a list, syncing with the smart cart, viewing the store floor plan, and coupon notifications.
For the smart cart, we put all components in a box on the shopping cart, and the LED light will change to green to indicate a successful connection between the phone and cart.
The light is controlled by a Particle photon microcontroller in the box, and we wrote C++ code to turn the light on and off. Our prototypes cover many aspects of the real shopping experience for users.
Demonstration Video
Ideal system proposal
The final proposed system consists of a sensor network that integrates with existing grocery store smartphone applications. Users pair their phone with a shopping cart by scanning the unique QR code on the cart, which establishes a Bluetooth connection. A network of indoor positioning sensors throughout the store will communicate with the hardware on cart with iBeacon technology. The cart communicates with the users’ phone via Bluetooth to show their location and where all the items are on their list on a birds-eye-view floor plan of the store.
This product would be sold to grocery store chains, Meijer in the example above, rather than exist as a standalone app for users to download. We would work with them to integrate our location-finding technology into their existing smartphone app, implement our sensor networks throughout their stores, and map their floor plans.
Reflection
Design Limitations
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This design requires users to own and use a smartphone to use this item-finding system.
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When it came down to considering different system architecture and what our product could look or function like, we considered ingraining privacy in the conceptual design of the product. During a storming session, we questioned whether we actually needed the cart. Ultimately we decided that the cart acts as a sort of conduit so that the dozens of beacons across the store aren’t all connecting with the phone. We believed that this adds an extra layer of security. We believe that the cart-to-phone data exchange will include built-in encryption/anonymization so the person’s identity isn’t directly connected and collected with the cart’s location information.​
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​Privacy remains a concern with a system like this. We gave users a clear and explicit way to disconnect their phones from the grocery cart, but users are also being tracked every step of the way through the store. Further research is required to see how much this bothers our target users.
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This system also depends on how well a network of indoor positioning sensors can support a large number of users in a small space. For the sake of this project, we are assuming that will work. However, our next steps should be to build the network we’re imagining and perform stress tests. How many users can it support in a large area? A small area? How many sensors are needed? How precisely can we calculate the user’s location?
If we did it again?
Overall, we believe this research process could have benefitted from a more thorough competitive analysis, or more research into technology that’s currently being used in shopping situations more generally. Additionally, we lacked strong evidence for making claims about our users because our sample sizes were small. Gathering more initial data through a survey would have given us a better picture of our target users, and would have served as a nice way to collect contact info for our future research methods.
Brand Identity
