Online grocery shopping experience : Carrefour case

Over the last years, food e-commerce has exploded. Before Covid-19, 70% of the french population did online grocery shopping in the last quarter of 2019 (a 4.4% year-on-year increase). In 2020, many consumers changed their consumption habits due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

We got interested to redesign the experience of the Carrefour online grocery shopping.

In France, Carrefour is one of the leader of the retail market. Multi format and multi channel, with supermarkets and local stores, Carrefour plans to become the leader of the online grocery shopping with a grocery marketplace at the end of 2020.

Goals

We assessed the usability and desirability of their online grocery shopping platform.

We divided our work into two steps :

• to assess the current state of things, understanding how people are currently using the service and what are their expectations and frustrations.
• to propose a concept that could answer the issues raised by the users during observations and the user’s interviews.

The timeline of this project was one week and a half.

To tackle this case, we were three UX/UI designers : Clara, Chloé and I, working all for the very first time together and remotely, due to the Covid situation. The whole team worked together through the different stages.

The scope

We approached this project following the design thinking process to make sure we understood the problem and proposed a coherent solution. Except for the prototype (made by Clara), we did all these stages together :

• Empathize with research (interviews & benchmarking) and data download (affinity diagram) to create our persona
• Define with mapping tools (user journey map) to formulate a relevant problem statement.
• Ideate (Crazy 8’s, storyboard & userflow) with low-fidelity drawings.
• Prototyping and testing our solution with a mid-fi prototype (designed by Clara) and usability test.
• Iterate the prototype regarding the insights of users.

Research

Our secondary researches highlighted how our project was relevant and could raise design opportunities. Even if during lockdown, the number of users of online grocery shopping increases as well as Carrefour visibility (+62%), it is not a bed of roses tough !
Many articles revealed that the lack of accessibility of online grocery shopping platform was a no-go for new users and 2/3 of consumers went back to physical store after confinement.

In parallel with secondary research, we conducted 5 remote user interviews with people using Carrefour platform or/and competing brands. We used Zoom to communicate and recorded the interviews.

IMAGE légende (slides)

People we met : 5 women, aged around 27 years old, working full time and living in a big city.

From these interviews, we gathered all the findings and illustrative quotes of users experience. We used Mural as a digital collaborative workspace. On it, we grouped them into an affinity diagram.

These interviews confirmed some of our assumptions :

• Users feel annoyed about stock management. They had a hard time to get their complete order. Generally, some items were missing and they were notified only at the end of the process (during validation order or later the day of delivery in a mail)
• Users don’t discover new products online and found the process too long to see details of products.
• Users buy heavy and dry products and less fresh products. They don’t trust /have enough information to choose fresh products and had some bad experience in the past (outdated products, wrong quantities…)
• Users feel lost sometimes on the platform : the layout is not enough aery, clear and the navigation is not intuitive.

After two rounds of vote (one vote for the category and another one for the point itself), we selected the pain points that seem the most relevant to the users.

Main pain points raised by users during interviews

Persona

From these materials collected, we were able to deeply empathize with users. We had a better understanding of user’s needs, goals, motivations and frustrations. We found some patterns and based on this, we brought our persona to life.

Let me introduce you Lea, an epicurean working girl living in a big European city.

From now, she will stay by our side, helping us staying on the right tracks !

Discovery

Lea’s journey map allowed us to highlight the main pain points encountered by users at each step of their experience.

We came up with four main points of friction in shopping and delivery phase :

• product’s visualization
• stock management
• fresh product

Lea’s user journey helped us identifying what were the design opportunities and where they took place (which indicated us which department of the firm were in charge of it).During a lot doting session, we selected the main pain point that seems urgent to treat for users : product visualization.

The problem

Based upon our research and analysis, we were able to express the right problem.

Léa, the epicurean working girl needs a way to choose at a glance the product fitting her needs (in terms of size, quantities, maturity, etc) because she doesn’t want to investigate more about the product characteristics and wants to receive exactly what she initially expected.

The solution

We used some creative tools to bring as many ideas as we can ! After multiple session of Crazy 8s and brainstorming, we came up with a user flow (made on miro) to distinguish clearly all the existing steps and new steps we add.

User flow : “discover” and “express” paths

Then, we designed a mid-fi prototype on Sketch and Marvel (interactions between screens).

The solution goes in two part:

• First, users will need to select the criteria according to what matters the most to them (price, organic, local production, gluten free, nutritional value, number of people…) to feed the algorithm.
• In a second part, when Lea is searching for a specific product, the products relevant to her filters come first. She can search for more details quickly by clicking on the eye icon on the picture of the product. A new pop up card appears and displays new features : recommendation quantity tool, 3D tool to visualize the product with a scale (a hand), a customize tool for expiration date.

We conducted usability testing remotely with 4 different users and asked them to realize one task :

Buy organic chicken for a BBQ with friends planned next week-end.

We came up with theses interesting findings :

• All the users enjoyed the details we put on the card, especially the « inspiration » tool that helps selecting the right quantity. But, the title was unclear for 3/4 of users.
• The icon « eye » which leads to the pop up card is unclear. All the users thought it leads to more pictures and not especially details or customization.
• 3/4 of users found some tools unnecessary : 3D tool visualization for example.
• 3/4 of users found difficult to customize the expiration date slider because it requires some cognitive load and prefer to choose a period than to select a specific expiration date.

We iterated and redesigned the mid-fi prototype, based upon their insights. Here you can see the second prototype for our solution :

Key learnings and next steps

We realized how the product visualization was important for users like Lea. It helps them saving time and finding the right products. Besides, this project allowed us to identify other pain points linked to our main pain point as stock management.

The next steps would be to :

• continue iteration on prototype
• schedule two other rounds of usability test to validate new features
• then, to deliver high-fidelity prototype & test it with the product owner.

Thanks for reading ! :)