Elevating the grocery shopping sustainability experience

By Julia Wang, Sami Foell, David Hewett, Niklas Britz

Problem and Solution Overview

Many food and beverage companies label their products as “organic”, “all-natural”, “fair-trade”, etc. However, many shoppers question their authenticity, definition, and higher prices, often opting for cheaper alternatives from food conglomerates even though these companies often, unbeknownst to many consumers, utilize highly unsustainable and unethical practices.

Our team dove deep into the shopping experience of people between 18–34 years of age, and we plan to curate a design solution for them to encourage more sustainable grocery shopping habits. Individuals in this age range (dubbed the “Green Generation”) are much more likely to purchase organic, healthy food options relative to other age demographics and demonstrate more environmentally friendly and socially-conscious consumer behavior given their rising spending power and digitally-enhanced information access.

Our intended design solution is a mobile application that allows users to efficiently carry out a sustainable grocery shopping workflow by elevating their current processes and relieving key pain points. Customers would be able to craft personalized shopping lists, identify sustainable brands with their camera, and learn about food & beverage industry dynamics in a simple, intuitive, and accessible manner.

Our goal is to create an experientially-meaningful application that allows grocery shoppers to be more informed and efficient when accomplishing their goals, overall encouraging more sustainable grocery purchasing behaviors and mindsets.

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants

After narrowing down our problem space and target population, our team began design research to understand our users’ current shopping routines, mental models, interaction patterns, pain points, and motivations.

We initially distributed a multiple-choice survey across a variety of online platforms, screening surveyees on our age parameter. This survey gave us quantitative data from over 40 respondents, including primary factors considered when purchasing groceries, importance assigned to sustainability behaviors, and familiarity with food & beverage conglomerate practices.

However, we wanted to dive deeper into these quantitative insights, and asked willing surveyees for contact information to conduct a semi-structured interview.

We conducted 3 Zoom interviews, which taught us more about our target audience and retrieved insightful qualitative data, including grocery purchasing behaviors, thoughts on sustainable companies and products, and important ideals surrounding shopping tasks. All interviewees are current students at the University of Washington (UW) and have a variety of educational, familial, and housing backgrounds.

Our team also conducted 3 contextual inquiries (direct observation and interviewing) at 3 separate grocery stores in the UW area. Participants were all grocery shoppers who were recruited based on age range; all were female UW students in their 20s.

These inquiries allowed us to better understand the current task flow carried out by participants in their natural environment through direct observation. We proceeded to ask them intentional questions afterward to uncover why certain products were avoided, why others were sought after, and what key goals and priorities they had while shopping.

Design Research Results and Themes

Using Miro and Dovetail, our team synthesized all of the data derived from our survey results, contextual inquiries, and semi-structured interviews. Through examination of survey quantitative data and implementation of affinity diagramming and thematic analysis, we derived several high level themes to describe our research.

One salient theme is credibility, as many customers mistrust sustainability claims and perceive them as performative, manipulative, or unreputable. People are discouraged from identifying credible sustainable brands due to conglomerates dominating the market. This causes larger companies to seem more legitimate due to exposure.

Data also indicates that our audience already engages in sustainable practices outside of shopping, including but not limited to recycling, composting, and avoiding plastic bags.

Structured spending is our last prevalent theme. Individuals tend to either create a list before shopping or gravitate towards cheaper products to save money. An overwhelming majority indicated a willingness to spend money on products that they perceive to be of value, importance, or quality. Consumers also view shopping as a chore, and often follow routines, shopping at weekly intervals in close proximity with an emphasis on efficiency.

Proposed Design

After completing synthesis, we ideated solutions to encourage sustainable grocery shopping and optimize shopping experience. We explored several mediums, including an intelligent shopping basket and key fob, and decided to move forward with a mobile solution for its greater accessibility, familiarity, and functionality. We created a set of low-fidelity sketches and accompanied storyboards to address key user tasks.

Our user research indicated that planning out a grocery shopping trip is a cornerstone task to the workflow, and key for users to achieve a sense of structure and efficiency. This in-app feature would allow users to create personalized grocery shopping lists for a particular store in advance and create a list based on products available, view product pricing relative to a set budget, and view the sustainability of products as they add them.

Our user research indicated a common pattern of uncertainty around shopping, particularly in regard to availability, pricing, item labels, and sustainability. This feature would help users alleviate the pain point. A set of low-fidelity wireframes are below. Users may create a shopping list and add grocery items accompanied with valuable metrics.

We created an accompanying storyboard to better visualize how potential users would engage with this feature, including motivations, steps taken, emotions felt, and visualize how our solution elevates that experience.

A second key task is when users try to identify legitimate sustainable products and companies. Research has revealed that there is a major gap in people’s ability to recognize sustainable food & beverage companies, interpet product labels (e.g. “all-natural”), differentiate similar products, and research companies on their own.

By empowering users to scan item barcodes, labels, and branding with their phones, they can quickly find palatable sustainability metrics. Shoppers can configure personalized profiles and prioritize metrics to get product information in an accessible fashion. We help them overcome barriers to make more informed purchases. One user-flow is below.

Based upon our extensive research and synthesis, these two tasks are integral to our users’ current and intended interactions, with a mobile interface being the most optimal design solution medium. We plan to expand upon our solution to elevate utility and curate a more holistically experiential yet elegant platform for users to engage with.

We look forward to continuing to detail and share our progress, and hope this project instills as much excitement in you as it does us!