My team consisted of Purdue students majoring in Game development (Pedro and Thomas), Web Programming (Joseph), and UX design (Logan). The idea of this project was to find a way to improve the shopping experience. Nowadays there have been many technological improvements leading to easy online shopping. However, this misses out on the human interactions people get when shopping on their own. We wanted to solve this issue while still using the advantages of modern technology. Our plan is to create an app that would map out food items based off the user’s shopping list. In order to approach this, we did interviews to improve our initial idea and created a contextual inquiry. Using this we found context that cannot be found from basic interviews, allowing us to further our idea with a better perspective.

Initial Design Space

Purpose: To create an enjoyable and efficient shopping experience for families, and to lessen their frustrations and stress

Stakeholders:

1. Primary: Family/Group shoppers (shoppers who shop for more than just themselves)

2. Secondary: Supermarkets (benefit from free data)

   

   First Storyboard

Secondary Research

Purpose and Goals

Our main goal when we conducted our interviews was to get more insight into the world of students, shoppers with large lists, and store employees. We wanted to understand the needs and struggles of the user in order to develop our idea into something better.

Findings

• Employees at grocery stores get distracted from their task by customers asking for directions to find something.
• Frequent Shoppers often go shopping with at least a general idea of what they want or need.
• As long as the program doesn’t hinder the shopping experience frequent shoppers are open to app assistance.

Results

Our group ended up with interviews from shoppers, student shoppers, and a store employee. We learned from our interviews that shoppers who spend 20-30 minutes or more in a store would be more likely to use our app as well as users who would want a smoother shopping experience. We also learned that our app would benefit store employees since customers could refer to interactive store map whenever they have questions.

Initial UI Sketch

Final UI Design Concept

Contextual Inquiry

Context: Shopping groceries at Costco for family

• Navigating checkout and store aisles
• Looking for items that aren’t stocked every time