For few years, food e-commerce is booming, the market will double again by 2025. Carrefour launched its first drive in 2011 but its platform must evolve according to user needs. The reality of online grocery shopping is that it’s supposed to be easier but it’s much more complicated and platforms needs to improve a lot.
The purpose of this UX project was about improving the usability and desirability of Carrefour online grocery shopping platform.
The team (3 UX/UI designers) decided to use the Design thinking process to achieve this goal, find pain points and solutions to these through the following steps : Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
Researches and results
In order to put ourself on the user shoes and empathize, we made some secondary researches of the actual online grocery shopping market and the competitors strategies. We noticed that there were a huge increase of online shopping, escpecially during and after the lockdown. Carrefour increases its visibility of 62% during lockdown.
We conducted remote interviews of five women aged between 25 and 28 years old, living in big cities and full-time working, and recolts a lot of findings, insights (positives and negatives) and quotes. We discovered that:
- Not carrying heavy stuffs and saving time was the main motivation
- Users are frustrated about the outdated or almost products
- They are upset and frustrated too when some products are missing in the order
- Users doesn’t have a good image about the product details, they feel disappointed to buy maybe a product that will not fit their needs in terms of size, freshness…
- They didn’t trust the brand regarding the freshness, especially for vegetables and fruits, and prefers buying dry products
The user
To help us, we created Léa, 26 years old, the working epicurean girl who prefers enjoing life than wasting her time doing duties. Meet her below and see her main frustrations and motivations.
To really understand each steps of Lea doing her online grocery shopping, we created her User Journey. Creating an emotional curve and see at a glance the main pain points helps us to define the design opportunities. We used a dot voting session to choose the main one.
To be efficient and dedicated to one feature, we focused on what we think was the main problem for Lea and we ended with a problem statement:
Léa, the epicurean working girl, needs a way to choose at a glance the product fitting her needs (in terms of size, quantities, maturity…) because she doesn’t want to investigate more about the product characteristics and wants to receive exactly what she initially expected.
We will know that we reach our goals if the average time spent on a product’s card decreases by 20% and when the number of requests about orders from customers (after sales) decreases significantly (qualitative & quantitative feedback) and if the feedback survey email sent by the company receive an average rate of more than 4,7/5.
This was our red wire until the end of the project.
Ideation & solutions
We ideated with the Crazy 8 tool to finish with 24 ideas of solution. We think about new features on the product page only, to increase the quality of Lea’s user experience and allow her to see all the informations at a glance and not be disappointed and surprise when receiving the order.
We draw several ideas and ended, thanks to a dot voting at one in particular regrouping all our ideas in one draw:
- the 3D view
- the expiration date slider
- the rule to measure
We construct the the “to be” Userflow with our new features starting from the mo
To test our solutions and validates our features, we conductes 4 usability tests session which helped us to focus on what was working and to cancel what not We noticed that the 3D view was not used and cancel it. Here is the features we kept:
- pre-selected filters based on Lea’s preferences to the product results page. She likes organic and products of French origin so these filters appear automatically when she connects on the platform and appears also as a tag under the product (1)
- a “see more” button with an eye on the picture, when Lea clicks on it, a pop-up will appear instead of a new product web page (1)
- a hand as a ruler next to the product so that Lea can know in advance the size of her products, especially fruits and vegetables or boxes (2)
- a feature to choose the maturity of products and their expiration date so Lea can choose how long she can consume them. If she chose an expiration date close to the same day, she would receive a discount to raise awareness of waste (2)
- a quantity recommendation feature to helps Lea, regarding the number of people and meals , how many product she should add on her basket
Now, Lea can visualize as in real life at Carrefour if the product will fit in her kitchen, if it will expire soon and how many she should buy. It reduce the disappointment and consolidate her trust in the brand.
The challenge is well done if Lea gives a positive rates to the brand on surveys (more than 4/5)and if she doesn’t call the after sale service anymore for disatisfaction because of almost outdated products.
Afterthought
Adding these features would help Carrefour to keep and fidelize its clients, it’s a huge benefits when we see the numbers of competitors to be able to differenciate itself with a great product visualization and customization. The online grocery shopping has beautiful days to come!
We really enjoyed applying design thinking and iteration to this UX project, especially with usability tests.
