GOOD MARKET
Disruptive Design
June 2017
Good Market is a fictitious grocery franchise based in the United States. Although their customer satisfaction ratings have remained constant for several years, they are steadily losing market share due to an increase in online grocery ordering and delivery. The goal of this project was to develop a product that would help Good Market increase their market share by allowing customers to order online. Because there are similar products already on the market, my secondary goal was to innovate online ordering in a way that would differentiate Good Market from its competition.
Business Goals
From insights gleaned through user and market research, Good Market created a persona called the Busy Professional to represent the young professionals that they expect will comprise a large percentage of their product’s users. Because the Busy Professional lives alone, works long hours, and has disposable income, they are the ideal market for an app that allows users to purchase groceries online and have them delivered to their homes. By appealing to the Busy Professional, Good Market hopes to regain the market share they’ve lost.
Card Sorting
To establish the information architecture of the product, I conducted an open card sort using some of the products from Good Market’s inventory. The participants were provided with the content and instructed to group them in whatever way they like and assign their own categories. Participant 1 grouped items very much as I would expect based on the typical layout of a grocery store, but I saw some interesting and unexpected groupings from Participant 2 and Participant 3. Specifically, I noticed they both relegated some items to a “Cooking Staples” category. This got me thinking about how I could arrange the content to make it even more efficient for someone with limited time.
Information Architecture
This phase was when I took a departure from the apps I looked at in my competitive analysis. In addition to searching by product, I gave the Good Market app the additional affordance of shopping for products based upon recipes. The idea is to allow the user to search or browse recipes and add products to their carts right from the individual recipe pages. The appeal here is to the busy professional who doesn’t have time to search for recipes on one application and then shop for ingredients on another. With one tap or click, they can add all the ingredients they need for a recipe to their cart.
User Flows
Because the design affords two different criteria for browsing (by recipe and by ingredient), I had to carefully consider the user flows. I wanted to make sure the features of the app flowed together intuitively and allowed for easy backtracking and cross navigation. When the user selects an ingredient, they have the option of viewing recipes that contain this ingredient; this provides an organic and convenient way for users to find new recipes. Again, the emphasis here is on convenience and efficiency for the time-strapped Busy Professional.
Results
The final deliverable for this project is an interactive prototype created in InVision. The prototype shows the minimum viable product for the primary actions of browsing and checking out. Future product development would include a cooking timer, the ability to create recipes, and a help center.