Snap & Shake is a design challenge project that aims to enhance the shopping experience for supermarket shoppers.

It involves user research and user experience skills:
1. Identify and solve design problems
2. Synthesize and prioritize information (Affinity wall)
3. Develop a deep understanding of users (Persona & User Journey & Story board)
4. Visual and interaction design (After Effects & Photoshop)

Time period:
Mar - Apr, 2017 (a month)

With a snap,

shoppers build and plan shopping lists with ease.

Snap & Shake is a smart assistant that helps you to build up and plan your repetitive shopping lists. It also reminds you to make purchase.

With a shake,

shoppers then knows exactly where to go, what to expect.

Snap & Shake tells you specifically what to do next based on your shopping list. It knows your preferences and concerns and gives you the most efficient way to achieve it.

Common need

"I want to shop efficiently with no concerns."

Many needs are uncovered through interview transcripts. However, a common need is concluded after a deep examination and thorough sorting through a affinity wall activity. User want to avoid spending too much time thinking about what and where to buy, going back and forth the supermarkets to buy an ideal brand, or buying unnecessary items an causing a waste of money. In sum, they want to shorten the shopping process and avoid the unnecessary efforts.

Shopper types

Identifying key variables to segment shopper types help clarifying business goal, prioritizing features and guiding product direction. There are three types of shopper:

Inactive / active type of shopper.
Frequent / Occasional shopper.
Explore / Compete type of shopper.

Active and frequent shopper being the focus.

Shoppers are significantly different in their attitudes, frequency of shopping and concerns. While Stephanie, the housewife, will be my primary persona in this project, taking other persona into consideration is also important in designing for the edge cases and facilitating solutions.

Shoppers are overwhelmed by.. when doing..

Mapping out users' behaviors and pain points in the whole shopping experiences with user journey, I identified the common patterns of user's behavior to generate design requirements and found the opportunities to ease their shopping experiences. Shopping is a series of consecutive activities, it's important to make sure that I am designing for "one" solution that includes several steps but "multiple" solutions. I will mainly focus on the process when user are "thinking about the items to buy" in this project due to the time limitation.

What about we allow shoppers to collect their repetitive list in their most comfortable ways, and so they needn't think or recall when planning items to buy? What about we also allow them to focus on planning items and we will take care of their concerns and provide suggestions so they could start shopping immediately?

Design.

Before moving into the design, some design requirements in mind based on the user research..

Quick access to start anytime.

Use explorable and relative clues to facilitate thinking.

Simplify features and use familiar patterns.

Provide actionable/practical suggestions.

User want to get things done.

User want to avoid recalling and thinking too much.

User want to focus on completing their current task.

User are worried and frustrated about “uncontrollable” factors that avoid them from completing tasks.

Help user recognize items to buy and start their task immediately.

The basic structure is composed of two parts: Library and shopping list which stay closely with one another.

In the Library, Stephanie could add a regular purchased list that contains items specifically for the health of her daughters. And Kevin could add a list of items by a recipe he want to try in the near future.