Shopper app

Reducing order delivery time by solving usability issues

Role

Duration

Product Designer

5 to 6 Months

Team

Product Manager, Customer Support, Engineers, Shoppers, Catalog and business operations

Context

Part of the mercadoni's environment, the shopper app was one of its main products.

The experience with the app was a bit clunky with ⭐️ 2.9 stars rate in the Play Store and 🚧 huge operative problems that impacted daily processes and customer satisfaction.

Skills

User Research

Prototyping and Interaction design

Surveys and Stakeholders Interviews

Ethnography

Archetypes Definition

Design System Library

🕵️ Understanding the user

What does the day of a shopper look like:

  • Accept a new order

  • Go to the store and pick up the products in the store

  • Provide constant communication with support and the customer for replacements or in-store issues

  • Pay and deliver the order

Within the time-constrained and stressful environment of the supermarket, finding all the products, managing possible refunds, getting requests from the customer and dealing with any external circumstances have a huge impact on the time shoppers spend on just one order, imagine needing to deliver 10 orders per day.

Life cycle of the shopper inside the company, where point 3 was the focus of my team.

🔍 How did we get to know our users?

Stakeholders Interviews: Aligning perceptions with business about behaviors, pains and expectations, by creating proto-personas based on behavior.

Shopper for a day: Going to the field as a shopper, receiving and delivering real orders, so we were able to understand what was happening.

1:1 interviews: As we received everyday shoppers in our office, we talked to them almost daily, documenting and understanding their pains during the orders and using the app.

What came up from the information?

I defined three different archetypes based on behaviors and beliefs, and more importantly, how much time they dedicate to working with us, as they share their time with other apps during the day. Some highlights were:

  • Clear payments consolidation

  • Better communication channels with clients and support during the order

  • Similarity with other app they use

👩‍🔬 Mapping the experience and defining KPIs

After collecting a lot of data from the 1:1 with stakeholders, interviews and surveys from +100 shoppers. I had all the information needed to create a more complete and detailed customer journey.

Why that was important?

We could relate each step of the journey with a KPI, making it easier for us from the product side to prioritise certain changes that will drive impact not only on the business side but also deliver a better experience to our shoppers.

Put at first the goals and key metrics to measure the outcome of the new shopper app.

  • Adding or replacing products during the order: Replacing products during pickup due to being out of stock, wrong size, or outdated catalog leads shoppers to make decisions on their own, risking not meeting customers’ expectations.

  • Contact with support and customers: They do not have a direct channel to contact support or customers during the order, they need to call them.

  • Process refunds easily: If the customer wants a refund after receiving the order, shoppers need to go through the reverse logistics process which is not clear and super stressful.

  • Customer and order information: To deliver within the ETA, shoppers require the right customer information sometimes, we show the wrong data. (address, contact, products).

  • Payment history: The gig economy is based on frequent earnings. Shoppers expected to have a clear understanding of their payment history.

  • Information architecture of the app: Complex flows to find important information, multiple steps and dead ends were part of the day-to-day of the shoppers,

😖 User main pain points

Busines operations were one of our main stakeholders, they managed the relationship with the shoppers and business objectives.

Teams involved during the project

Engineers are closely involved in estimating effort, refinement of the project, creation of task stories and understanding the flow of users.

Catalog team consulted to understand how we manage our stock, report issues and difference between the store and the app information,

Customer support they are in contact with both clients and shoppers in a daily basis, so they had lots of information about common complains and pains.

Finance team regarding the payment information and how we process the payments to our shoppers for the orders they deliver.

And of course, the Product Manager was an important part of this project as the main ally and support partner.

🎨 Final experience

💡 What did I learn after?

Test and learn faster to iterate

At first, I spent too much time finishing full flows to test them, but the team pushed me to test early scans faster with buyers to learn and iterate.

Alignment across teams is key

If teams are isolated and no one cares about you as a designer, you need to speak up and align with what we want to achieve.

How the design would impact the business?

Thinking from the beginning about what are the metrics that we need to impact, gave us clarity about the things we needed to complete and what our impact would look like.

Understand what's happening inside

If you think the team is doing things wrong, don't judge, first empathize and listen to what's going on. This helps you create a better vision.

Split into different phases

We scoped the project early on in the areas we wanted to focus on, but we didn't split the project into different faces with the engineering team to deliver value faster.

Prioritization to deliver value

With few resources, the need to prioritize to take advantage of the time we had and focus on the important things.