INSTACART
Timeframe
1 Month
Role
Student project for UX/UI bootcamp
Tools
Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Invision, Google Slides, & Zoom
Overview
A fictitious grocery franchise promoting convenience. According to user and market research, many customers prefer faster, easier, and more convenient grocery shopping. Nevada-based Instacart plans national expansion.
Problem
Before expanding nationally, we need to gain a larger customer base. How can traditional grocery shoppers use eCommerce?
Solution
Creating user-friendly, low-fidelity, and high-fidelity responsive web design (RWD) solutions through a clickable UI prototype. A platform that makes the experience a quick and easy errand that can be done from desks, homes, or while getting a tattoo.
1/ RESEARCH
Implement Design Thinking
1.1/ Interview
Objective
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Obtain a strong foundation for our customer base.
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Begin an anchor point of customer comprehension.
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Collect data to create personas.
QUESTIONS:
·What is your name?
·What is your age?
·Are you single or married?
·How many people live in your household?
·How many times a week do you go grocery shopping?
·What is your preferred grocery store?
·What time of the day do you usually grocery shop?
·Do you usually go shopping by yourself or with your family?
·What frustrates you the most about grocery shopping?
·What electronic device are you on the most?
·Have you done online shopping before?
·If yes: ·What did you enjoy the most about your experience? ·What frustrates you the most about online grocery shopping?
·If no: ·Would you be willing to try online grocery shopping?
What I learned
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Driving to the store, finding parking, and waiting in line frustrate most people.
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Most people prefer online interviews. It gives the freedom to respond when and how.
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Open-ended and follow-up questions provide more information.
1.2/ Persona & Empathy map
Objective
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Create personas from interview insights.
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Establish personas to represent users.
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Create a variety of personas to help ensure high levels of user engagement.
Objective
What I learned
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Persona creation is tricky. People are widely diverse. To emphasize, use a diverse set of personas.
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Different backgrounds and living situations have similar needs. This enables diverse client service.
1.3/ Observational note
Objective
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Compare the experiences of in-store and online shopping.
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Identify the main characteristics of traditional shopping.
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Offer online equivalents.
Physical shopping experience
Accommodation
Physically touching the product.
Multiple imagines of the product.
Seeing the number of items in cart.
Have visual representation of online cart.
What I learned
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A real-life action can be transformed into a digital experience.
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Don't make the experience foreign.
1.4/ Competitive analysis
1.4/ Competitive analysis
Objective
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Analyzing three major competitors to discover how we can differentiate.
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Find the industry standard.
What I learned
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It is best not to deviate from the standards, but to determine how the element will help our goals.
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It is simple to replicate the competitors. The task is to draw influences rather than copy them.
2/ DESIGN
2.1/ Sitemap & User flow
Objective
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Map out the site and user flow to make grocery shopping more convenient.
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Find areas of the site that shoppers might find confusing.
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Put myself in the user's shoes to understand INSTACART's constraints.
What I learned
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INSTACART has many pages and components.
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Users can get lost.
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User journeys vary. Clearer UI/UX reduces confusion.
3/ PROTOTYPE
3.1/ Style guide
3.2/ Links to Protoypes
3.3/ Web Protoype
3.4/ Tablet Protoype
3.5/ Mobile Protoype
REFLECTION
What I learned so far
USER FIRST
Focus on the overall user experience first then the design. As UX designers, we design for the user. This is my first project, I was fixated on how the design would look and often neglected the users’ needs.
DESIGNING IS A TEAM EFFORT
Asking my mentor for advice and using her input gave me a fresh perspective on the design.
WE ARE DESIGNING A SYSTEM OF COMPONENTS.
We’re not designing pages, we’re designing systems of components.
—Stephen Hay quoted in the book Atomic Design by Brad Forst
