Food Lab: Improving grocery-shopping experience with AR

Roles
UI/UX Design
Visual Design
Design Research

Tools
Sketch/inVision
Adobe Illustrator

Timeframe
Jun - Aug 2018

Right now, customers struggle with unfamiliar ingredients during grocery shopping and have a hard time keeping track of groceries left at home.

We wanted to use AR to improve costumers’ experience with unfamiliar ingredients at grocery stores as well as groceries left at home.

How might we use technologies to improve customers’ grocery-shopping experience with unfamiliar ingredients?

Introducing Food Lab…

Food Lab uses augmented reality to provide customers with essential information on unfamiliar ingredients quickly and conveniently. It also uses matching algorithm to suggest recipes based on what ingredients users have on hand with a consideration of cooking time, flavors and meal sizes. The homepage will also provide users with personalized recipe recommendations based on users’ tastes and dietary needs.

The targeted users are customers who like trying new ingredients and international students who have little understanding of some of ingredients on market.

While we all worked together on the research, ideation and visual design phases. As the UI/UX designer on the team, I took charge of creating the high-fidelity prototype as well as creating the user flow. In addition, I am also responsible for branding our product including designing the app logo.

Research Phase
Stakeholder interviews, secondary research, competitive analysis, user persona, journey maps, help with research synthesis and list constraints and opportunities for product’s roadmap.

Ideation Phase
Summarize needs statement, prioritizing important features and prepare user scenarios.

Prototyping Phase
Build wireframes, create user flows for different features, user test the flows and iterate from feedback and design final prototypes. Creating a visual design guideline to ensure the design system is cohesive throughout the platform.

Motion Design
Design micro-interactions for final presentation.

For our research, we initially conducted open ended interviews to find out what current problems people usually encounter while shopping grocery. Then, with the focus on unfamiliar ingredients, we conducted several semi-structured interviews and user observation to better understand users’ pain points.

Open Ended Interviews

This helped us to explore different problems that grocery shopper face everyday. We eventually narrowed down on designing a solution to improver users’ grocery experience with unfamiliar food. We also group interviewees by role and identify behavioral variables for each role. This helped us to create personas and identify user pain points.

Semi-structured Interview

After we defined the problem areas, semi-structured interview helped us gather detailed feedback and responses on users’ grocery experience. We want to analyze the current problem areas as well as identify user experiences that surprise us.

User Observation

After the semi-structured interviews, we came up with a user observation guide to observe users’ behaviors and processes during grocery shopping. We shadowed users in the store, and asked them to complete certain tasks related to purchasing a familiar ingredient. We asked them to do a think-aloud of how they want to accomplish the tasks and why they want to do so. While the participants walked around the store, we took notes and videos for reference. After they were done with the tasks, we asked them some follow-up questions for more insights on their specific actions and emotions.

Users struggle with...

Wasting a lot of time manually searching on the internet about unfamiliar ingredients
- Switching back and forth between multiple applications
- Filtering useful information
Keeping track of groceries left at home
Utilizing the leftover ingredients in the fridge to cook nice dishes

Users want to...

Retrieve useful information about unfamiliar ingredients/foods quickly and conveniently
- flavors, recipes, other ingredients that best goes with it, etc.
- Track refrigerator on ingredients consumption
Have smart recommendation that suggest recipes based on what is left at home with a consideration of cooking time, flavors and meal sizes

Interaction 2

After the ingredient is identified, its label will be shown.

Interaction 1

Users scan the unfamiliar ingredient in order to retrieve more information.

Interaction 3

Essential information including “best goes with”, tags and recipes will be shown.

Interaction 4

Users can select the ingredients they want to use, and generate recipes with the chosen ingredients.

3 participants for each test - Measured ease of use / Measured task completion time

TEST A: without the app

TASK ONE - RETRIEVE INFO
Pick up an unfamiliar ingredient and then look up useful information about the ingredient including flavor, recipes and other ingredients that best goes with it.

TASK TWO - GET A RECIPE
Look for a recipe on the internet based on what ingredients are left at home with a consideration of cooking time, meal sizes and tastes.

TEST B: with the app

TASK ONE - RETRIEVE INFO
Scanning the unfamiliar ingredient with the AR function in the app to retrieve useful information including flavor, recipes and other ingredients that best goes with it.

TASK TWO - GET A RECIPE
Use “MY FOOD LAB” page and filter function to find a recipe that uses the ingredients left at home with a consideration of cooking time, meal sizes and tastes.

On average, users saves 83.3% of the time retrieving information on the unfamiliar ingredient and 87.5% of the time getting a recipe with the ingredients left at home.

Collaboration is key for remote teams

I worked with a remote team for this project, and communication and tracking work and productivity are some of the challenges we faced. Some strategies we used to overcome the challenges include , setting clear exceptions in written forms and reviewing our progress twice a week with each other by video calls. It is also really important to use communication tool and collaboration tool such as slack and mural.

Plan ahead

Time zone differences between team members is another challenge we faced. Therefore, it is really important to plan ahead such as finding and setting block times where teammates’ work hours overlap to form “office hours”. Recording meetings and keep meeting notes organized are also really useful so that teammates can refer back to it anytime.