Andrea Wong

For this project, I followed a user-centred process that involved conducting interviews, creating personas, constructing a user journey map, and coming up with a concept for a design solution. The vehicle for this solution—a mobile app—was in this case predetermined. However, while I was able to identify two user groups who would be likely to try and to benefit from a new Superstore app, I also identified some groups that might be better served by another kind of solution in the environmental or service design realm. However, based on the constraints of the assignment brief, I limited myself to researching and designing with the specified mobile app product type in mind. To get acquainted with Superstore’s users and non-users, I visited different grocery stores to conduct brief, on-location interviews to probe for motivations behind certain behaviours. I conducted longer, semi-structured interviews with people I encountered at bus stops and in other sit-down or waiting situations.

I reviewed my notes to look for repeated instances of specific categories of behaviours, interests, and preferences between the interview subjects. I then sorted interviewees in relation to each of these, and took note of high-frequency instances where numerous people were clustered around certain expressions of each category. This was one of the most difficult parts of the process, because I didn’t want to force a pattern where there was none. To summarize this phase in my research, I created user personas by identifying possible groupings of the interview subjects, and ultimately ended up with these two: Jaime and Ric.

Next, I created journey maps to work out how Jaime’s and Ric’s experiences surrounding food purchasing, preparation, and consumption played out over the course of a typical day. I drew on the personas to articulate goals, actions, thoughts, and feelings at each phase. Rather than expressing touchpoints in terms of interactions with Superstore, I emphasized touchpoints with food in general. In doing so, I left open the possibility of creating an app that answered to the needs of grocery shoppers, and not just grocery shoppers who are already Superstore customers. I tracked both positive and negative emotions (pain points) as 'feelings', but drew attention to opportunities for design interventions by posing questions. The questions that arise from the journey mapping process will lead my design strategy going forward.