Grocery
Maximizing convenience and empowering interactions for shoppers while balancing convenience and sales tradeoffs
Customers now shop frequently each week, often using new pandemic-era delivery services that bring items to their doors or cars. While convenient, these services reduce in-store visits and limit businesses' ability to engage customers with in-store advertising. Target, a large, family-friendly brand with nationwide accessibility, emerged as a strong fit for our project’s theme. Our research focused on understanding modern grocery shoppers' habits to create a service that draws customers back into stores, enhancing their engagement with the shopping environment.
Exploratory Research
Purpose and Goals
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What factors influenced shopping during the pandemic?
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Are current advertising tactics, such as sampling, effective?
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How do children influence purchasing decisions?
Background Research
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First, we investigate the shift in grocery shopping preferences and practices before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Next, we learned about the effectiveness of sampling items in-store for consumers with intent to buy the promoted product and ones with no previous plans.
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Finally, we gained insight into the influence children have on purchasing decisions during shopping trips.
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With these insights my team and I came up with the following problem space.
Our Challenge
Problem Statement
Parents face significant challenges when shopping with their children in grocery stores, balancing the immediate task of managing their behavior while also missing critical opportunities to teach them about nutrition and life skills due to time constraints.
Design Question
How can we create a game that allows parents to easily shop for groceries while helping kids learn about healthy eating and important life skills, such as financial literacy and distinguishing between wants and needs, in a fun way?
Purpose of Our Data Collection
Secondary Research
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​To investigate topics surrounding children attention spans, their relationship with nutrition, and consumer behavior regarding sampling, discounts, and loyalty cards, to understand influences on a child’s shopping habits.
Interviews
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To gain an understanding of parents’ current and previous experiences in shopping with their children ages 6 and above.
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To explore differences in shopping experiences across various age ranges and their shopping choices.
Observations
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To gain a realistic understanding of how parents and children interact in the grocery store.
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To understand how engaged and involved children were in the grocery shopping trip.
Data Analysis
Secondary Research
Within our secondary research, my team and I investigated children attention spans, their relationship with nutrition, and consumer behavior regarding sampling, discounts, and loyalty cards, to understand influences on a child’s shopping habits.
Children Attention
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Children’s attention spans aren’t fixed and can vary depending on the task at hand. If the task interests and engages the child, they will focus longer.
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When a child overcomes a challenge or answers a question correctly, they feel excitement and pride, which boosts their self-esteem.
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Interactivity was a significant factor in engagement and learning for enjoyment of the VR
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Reducing screen time lowers the risk of developing a shorter visual-spatial attention span
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Student literacy and math skills are at a record low, with a third of students unable to read at a basic level.
Children and Nutrition
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Children want to be engaged in choosing what they eat and the overall shopping process.
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Stores use marketing tactics leading children to develop unhealthy eating habits and decisions.
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When children develop unhealthy eating habits, it can lead the rest of the family to adopt similar habits.
Consumer Behavior Regarding Sampling, Discounts, and Loyalty Cards
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Free sampling captures consumers' attention and time, providing an opportunity for a salesperson to engage with them directly.
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A loyalty program rewards your most profitable customers.
Observation
A couple team members and I, took part in various observation sessions all at different times and places. During my observations I focused on interactions of parents with their children across various sections of the store. I found that children are often bored and not engaged in their shopping trips. To accommodate for this parents often try to shop faster. I also observed children having a higher level of engagement in the candy or snack aisles.
After I completed my observation session, my team and I came together to affinity diagram our observations above. As you can see we grouped the similarities into the following five categories: requests and responses, children’s interests, parent management, parental goals, and child-parent proximity.
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Based on these observations we narrowed our user group and wanted to ensure kids were eating fruits and vegetables, so we included recipes introducing fruits and vegetables in a fun way, such as ants on a log.
Prototyping
Journey Map
We completed User Journeys to empathize with how parents and children may feel during different points of their shopping experience if they were to partake in our game. From the journeys we identified potential issues and fixed them accordingly to ensure a smooth shopping experience. Below is a user journey made by one of my team members made.
In this journey, Ethan, a father wanting to teach his son Jake about financial literacy, decides to attend a family shopping event. Jake, a picky eater, agrees to join since they’ll only buy food he likes. At the store, Ethan lets Jake take charge, encouraging him to navigate the shopping list, participate in a treasure hunt, and try food samples. Jake enthusiastically completes the hunt, calculates item prices accurately, and earns a prize along with a punch card for Ethan. The trip is a success, with Jake gaining confidence, independence, and excitement about new foods, while Ethan celebrates his son's learning experience.
Prototype
Much of our data collection above informed the designing of this card. For example, for the allergy signs on the card were implemented after we had an interviewee that discussed how challenging it can be to shop for their child with a peanut allergy.
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To the left is the front of our Treasure Hunt Card. It includes ingredients to a recipe covering all portions of MyPlate Food Guide. I also included a description about the nutrition that each items provide.
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To the right is the back of our Treasure Hunt Card. It includes a map displaying the locations of the item. After multiple iterations we decided to include the map on the back of the card to make it easier for users to read.
Below is the front of our Treasure Hunt Card. It includes ingredients to a recipe covering all portions of MyPlate Food Guide. I also included a description about the nutrition that each items provide.
Conclusion
Impact
Beginning our project we identified our user group and investigated advertising techniques in stores and why more people turned to online shopping. Throughout investigation, my team immersed in the problem space, uncovering factors influencing child behavior and challenges faced by parents while completing shopping trips. During the ideation phase, we designed a new in-store experience allowing parents to teach their children critical life-skills in a fun and engaging way.
Every data point collected from our research and analysis influenced new changes in our solution ensuring our solution would be educational kids and have incentive for care givers. This game seamlessly connects education and fun enabling parents to shop without being distracted by their child.