Overview

About TenIchi

TenIchi Mart is a Japanese grocery store and deli with two locations in Brooklyn - one in Cobble Hill, and one in Williamsburg. They offer ready to eat meals, grocery items, as well as some household, beauty, and stationary goods.

Challenge

Remote work and online ordering has increasingly become the norm for many New Yorkers. The ability to work from home or for a company that supports a hybrid model means that more people will be eating and shopping locally, whereas they previously would have been patrons of businesses closer to their office. The market is missing a huge opportunity to reach potential customers if it does not have an online presence.

• Page layouts were inconsistent, misaligned, & outdated

• Listed inventory did not reflect current mart offerings, even though it seems that checkout feature is fully functioning [I’m honestly not sure what I would received if I placed an order, if anything at all!]

• The incomplete nature of the website does not instill trust or project a professional image

• The general aesthetics of the page are not particularly appealing to users, especially when compared against other competitors such as Whole Foods [who is also in the neighborhood].

Meet The Users!

I interviewed 3 people who order groceries and food via the phone. Each interview had a duration of approximately 10-20 minutes each. One interviewee was already a customer of TenIchi and the other two users regularly shop at Asian grocery stores. Through these interviews, I aimed to learn more about their online ordering habits and any potential motivating or discouraging factors.

• Some users had a sensitivity to packaging & waste

• All users felt delivery estimates were important, both being provided them prior to ordering and accuracy after ordering

• Search and filter functions must work well

• Quality of food and produce was a concern

• Convenience and ease of use is important

Creating Personas

Using my affinity map as a guide, I was able to extract two distinct user personas, each with different wants & needs: Conscious Consumer and Delivery Dependent.

Problem Statements

Delivery Dependent: This user needs a consistent, quick, easy, and reliable online ordering and delivery experience on the store's website.

Conscious Consumer: This user needs an in-store pick up experience from the store's website that minimizes waste and gives the user control of the product/produce that is selected.

Solutions

Delivery Dependent - Features that support speed and reliability for delivery:

• Saved Profiles with all info to save time at checkout

• Live order tracking & updates

• Recommended items on feature pages based on items frequently bought together and also impulse items at checkout

Conscious Consumer - Features that support sustainability and quality control for pickup:

• Local pickup option

• Option to bring your own bags with recommended # of bags based on purchase

• Option for no utensils or napkins with order

• Ability to inspect products and swap out at pickup if the quality is not up to standards

Comparitive Analysis

To ensure the user experience on TenIchi’s web was aligned with Nielson’s usability heuristic #4 of consistency and standards (heuristics = broad rules of thumb for design), I begin to examine delivery and pickup order flows on competitor’s websites.

Task 1: To evaluate the process of finding an item without using search, adding it to the cart, and scheduling a delivery, I created the following task: “Imagine you’re cooking dinner and you realize you’re out of rice. Use the website to locate white rice, add it to your basket, and have it delivered to your home”.

Task 2: To evaluate the process of finding an item without using search, adding it to the cart, and scheduling a pickup, I created the following task: “Imagine you’re cooking dinner and you realize you’re out of rice. Use the website to locate white rice, add it to your basket, and select a time to pick it up at the store”.

Key Findings:

• Each flow had about the same amount of steps for each task between vendors

• Login/Register was introduced at different points

• The Fresh Market allows you to directly add a product to the cart and select a quantity from the search results whereas Whole Foods requires you to to go the product page to select the quantity.

• Only one vendor had a significantly different flow for pickup, which was Target. They invite the user to select pickup BEFORE shopping, as opposed to being part of the checkout process like the other websites.

Cart Sorting

The participants were asked to sort the 50 items, one written on each ‘card’, into as many different categories of their choosing as they liked. I found that there was quite a bit of overlap between the categories each of the 3 users sorted the items into, and this is how I landed on my final categories of: Candy, Snacks, Condiments, Beverages, Noodles, Produce, Frozen, and Ready to Eat.

Sketching & Wireframes

Prototype Testing

Testing Objectives:

• To understand users' impressions of the homepage - what elements are they drawn to and where do they go first?

• To determine how users interact with the global navigation & hierarchy of information

• To gather user impressions of the product pages & overall design

• To identify pain points users might encounter throughout the entire process

View the walkthrough of the pickup order flow below ⇣

Prototype Test Results

• All users were successful in finding and adding items to the cart on their first try

• Appreciated saved profiles that include all information so nothing needs to be manually input

• Overall visual design/branding

Prototype Test Results [cont’d]

Just For Fun…