User research, persona creation, and journey mapping for a grocery shopping mobile app.

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 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. A truly user-centred process would have allowed for the possibility of creating such solutions; 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.

My first step was to get aquainted with Superstore’s users and non-users. I visited Superstore, Kin’s Farm Market, No Frills, Safeway, London Drugs, Granville Island Market, and small greengrocers to observe shoppers in action and to conduct brief, on-location interviews to probe for motivations behind certain behaviours. I also read online reviews to learn about users’ experiences in their own words and images. I conducted longer, semi structured interviews in person with people I encountered at bus stops and in other sit-down or waiting situations. Overall, I tried to keep my tone conversational and aimed for depth rather than breadth of questioning. I needed to build trust, especially in longer interviews, because when appropriate, I also wanted to gather information about people’s lifestyles: their commutes, their occupations, the people in their households, whether they had pets, their neighbourhoods, etc.

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.