Making grocery shopping exciting
Project overview
The Tesco groceries app wanted to encourage its users to try new products and bring some inspiration to their cooking.
As the UX Designer on the Tesco Groceries app project, my role was to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping experiences. I focused on understanding user behaviours, identifying what inspired them while shopping, and how these motivations translated into digital interactions.
By conducting user research, I explored how customers discover new products, plan meals, and engage with grocery shopping beyond routine purchases. These insights informed the design of a more intuitive and engaging app experience, helping users find inspiration, make better purchasing decisions, and break away from repetitive shopping habits.
Challenge
Problem statement
Users of the Tesco Groceries app often find meal planning uninspiring and struggle to discover new products that suit their preferences. This leads to repetitive shopping habits and missed opportunities for culinary exploration. Additionally, without personalized recommendations, users may overlook items that align with their tastes, resulting in a less engaging shopping experience.
How might we inspire users in meal planning and product discovery to make grocery shopping more engaging and less repetitive?
Discovery phase
I ran user sessions with several participants to understand their needs and link these to business opportunities.
Main user pain points:
Uninspiring meal planning: Users often found meal planning monotonous, leading to repetitive shopping habits and limited culinary exploration.
Limited product discovery: The existing app design made it challenging for users to discover new products that aligned with their preferences, resulting in missed opportunities to diversify their shopping lists.
Food waste concerns: Users expressed frustration over purchasing ingredients they already had at home, leading to unnecessary food waste.
Business Opportunities Identified:
Personalised recipe recommendations: By integrating a feature that suggests recipes based on users' frequently purchased items and new products, the app could inspire users to try new dishes and reduce food waste.
Enhanced user engagement: Introducing interactive and personalised content, such as tailored meal plans and product suggestions, could increase user engagement and satisfaction.
Increased sales of new products: Highlighting new or relevant products within personalised recipes presents opportunities for upselling and diversifying users' shopping baskets.
User Flow: Enhancing Meal Planning and Product Discovery
To address the challenges users faced with uninspiring meal planning and limited product discovery, I redesigned the user flow to create a more engaging and personalized experience
Hypothesis
If users are provided with recommended recipes based on the ingredients they already have at home or in their shopping basket, they will reduce food waste and discover new ideas for their everyday menus.
Reimagine cooking
I shared several prototypes with customers during the moderated sessions to validate hypothesis and understand how they were behaving when provided with certain tasks.
Final product
The final version was live 3 months after the first wires were done. Below there is a gallery displaying screenshots with the features and functions the new groceries app has.
Live feedback
There was a clear increase of new products being added to baskets.
After 2 months of monitoring users behaviour, some of these new products make it into customer’s favourites selection and were then a regular product in their grocery shopping list.