The New Grocer
Better UX for Singapore's speciality grocery stores
Clients
Grocery Stores
Year
2021
Background
Online grocery shopping in Singapore is on the rise due to Covid -19 and safe distancing measures. While commonplace grocery stores, such as RedMart, Fairprice, Cold Storage, Giant, and Amazon Fresh, are great for getting your daily essentials, they sometimes fall short when looking for quality food, or gluten-free products, or special ingredients. On the other hand, we have several specialised stores to fill the gap and provide us with organic, high quality and fresh products.
However, there are only a few speciality stores invested in building dedicated apps to serve their customers. As a representative of the specialty grocery segment, I picked a well-known and popular chain in Singapore: Little Farms.
Problem
Although the majority of specialty stores maintain an online presence, they often fail to provide a convenient platform for users to access their offerings at any time and place, such as through a dedicated app. A grocery store without an app risks losing touch with its customers.
(E.g. an app could be used to display banners promoting special Christmas ingredient bundles or to give away almost-expired fruit, among other things.)
Challenge
To build an App that helps specialty grocery stores, like Little Farms, to better engage its users’ day-to-day purchase of groceries.
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The solution ought to give speciality stores a competitive edge over other more prominent players in Singapore and allow the speciality stores to have better-performing customer touchpoints.
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Maybank Kim Eng economist Lee Ju Ye, said:
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“Consumers are increasingly shifting to online platforms, especially for purchase of groceries, food delivery, and also for non-essential items such as computer and telecommunications equipment and furniture - most likely due to work-from-home policies fuelling demand for office-related equipment and ergonomic chairs.”
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In a more local market-relevant context, Channel News Asia also said:
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“Research firm IGD Asia found that Singapore’s grocery market saw stellar performances too, and is forecasted to be a SGD $9.9 billion industry by 2023, a 14.5% increase from 2018. Online grocery shopping is leading that growth, with players such as RedMart and NTUC FairPrice dominating the local scene.”
Discovery
After thoroughly examining a few commonplace grocery apps in Singapore, the main competition is around better convenience of delivery or slight differences in price for the same items.
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The core mechanics of the grocery apps are more or less the same, from selecting the things you want to buy to choosing a time slot for delivery, checking out. There doesn't appear to be a single grocery app in Singapore that distinguishes itself through special features and a unique user interface capable of enhancing the user experience.
Offline vs. Online Opportunity Mapping
I took a trip to a commonplace, offline, grocery store in order to map out the user journey that shoppers traditionally go through. As a second step, I identified certain opportunities within the offline journey that, currently, online grocery stores are not taking advantage of.
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User Journey Exercise
The Setting: An end-end shopping experience in a physical shop.
Task: To buy groceries for dinner with my roommate on a typical sunny day in Singapore.
Opportunity: To make meal planning and shopping list a breeze.​
Requirements
Based on a few quick interviews and competitive analysis, the first version will be a grocery app that solves for the following user stories:
🛒 As a user, I want to collaborate on the order with my partner.
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🛒 As a user, I want to monitor my spending every time I place an item in the cart.
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🛒 As a user, I want to plan my meals without much effort.
App Showcase & Features
Shared Cart
Optimise for more than one person!
3 out of 5 interviewees usually order their groceries with another person, a partner, or a roomie. As it’s possible to co-order food in Grab and Foodpanda, I’ve incorporated the same logic into the UX flow - A shared cart allows more than one person to purchase together, in a single order.
Hassle-free planing
Discover recipes and do you shopping in one place.
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The Recipe feature provides a list of meal suggestions for users to easily discover a quick or a preferred recipe. A few mini-features under this feature are as follows:
🛒 Helps to properly measure how much you need in a recipe based on the number of people to serve.
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🛒 Adds all ingredients of the selected recipe to the cart in one single tap.
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🛒 Saves your favourite recipes so that you can cook (and buy!) them whenever you crave.
Increased awareness
A sticky, informative, shopping cart
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A sticky cart helps users to be aware of how many items have been added to the cart, and also the total cost of the items that have been placed in the cart. For every screen the user visits, the cart is always clearly visible to encourage action and awareness.