Produce Up
Re-thinking the in-store customer checkout experience for produce at Giant Eagle.
Client
Giant Eagle
Integrated Product Development Capstone
Team
Eileen Wang, Ria Jethmalani, Shreyas Sridhar, Rahul Sridhar, Fangzheng Zhu
Timeline
January - May 2020
(15 weeks)
How might we improve the checkout experience in-store?
Giant Eagle is a Midwestern supermarket chain known for being a leading community employer in Pittsburgh, and they also pride themselves for being the leader in sourcing local produce.
Giant Eagle sponsored Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovations Institute to help them re-think checkout at their stores.
Giant Eagle identified checking out at the supermarket as consistently rated as one of the biggest pain points for customers.
They wanted their customers to have a more pleasant and intuitive experience without giving up any of the accuracy and consistency of traditional checkout. They were looking for an experience that was dramatically different from today’s, but still viable to implement in the near-term.
ProduceUp
Through our research we identified that the existing system for checking out produce items was the biggest issue in the checkout experience, making it cumbersome not only for customers but also for staff members due to long queues and an error-prone checkout interface for loose produce items.
ProduceUp eliminates challenges that Giant Eagle customers and employees face when checking out produce.
By tracking produce weight and cost automatically as customers pick it up off the shelf, ProduceUp allows customers to check out bags of produce in less than 3 seconds.
No More Weighing
A smart shelf that weighs the items being picked prints a barcode sticker with the weight and price of produce.
Barcodes = 0% Errors
Barcodes ensure error-free scanning of produce at checkout like any other non-produce items found in store.
A Stress-free Checkout
This means fewer tasks for the customers at self-checkout and the cashier at manned lanes.
My Role
User Research
Guided team to identify product opportunity gaps through user research and design thinking methods to derive insights on customer pain points.
Research methods utilized include: in-store interviews, contextual inquiry, observations and competitor analysis.
User Experience Design
Collaborated with teammates to brainstorm solutions and design a service prototype to optimize the in store shopping experience and check out process of produce items for Giant Eagle customers.
Prototyping & Testing
Created concept explainer videos to communicate opportunity and final proposal to client.
Conducted 2 iterative rounds of testing for validating and improving the prototype concept with 8 customers to iterate and improve the proposed solution.
Design Process
Using British Design Council’s Double Diamond Process, we first identified the main pain points in the checkout process as well as factors crucial for both customers and front-end team members to have a stress-free produce checkout experience.
Research
Stakeholder Mapping
We began to address the challenge by first mapping out all the stakeholders involved with the Front-End of Giant Eagle stores and the relationships they have between each other to understand the whole system involved in this problem. This helped us to identify the key stakeholders we need to solve this problem for.
User Interviews
Research Goals
Understand the checkout experience of customers
Identify current unmet needs and inefficiencies for customers at checkout
Identify current pain points of front end employees who assist customers with checkout
Document issues management sees in the current checkout process
Participant Recruitment
We visited stores to observe shopper behavior at checkout and conduct in-store interviews to understand the pain points of the current checkout system with 2 key stakeholders:
Customers of different demographic & psychographic backgrounds
Store leadership and staff members responsible for managing the front-end of Giant Eagle stores.
Questions for Customers
What are the products you find difficult to scan during self checkout?
With Giant Eagle offering online shopping and home delivery, what brings you to the store?
Tell us about a situation or experience at self checkout when you had to ask for help?
Questions for Staff Members
What are some current challenges you have while helping people checkout?
What do you think are the biggest challenges preventing shoppers from using the self-checkout?
Do you have any best practices for managing the checkout line?
Personas
The personas and the scenarios they experience that are documented below, represent a synthesis of our research findings after interviewing 22 customers and 7 front-end team members. While Jack and Chris are fictional, their goals, attitudes, and pain points are rooted in events that shoppers and team members experience in Giant Eagle stores on a daily basis.
Journey Mapping
The user journey flow models patterns of behavior that recurred across our observations and interviews of Giant Eagle front-end team members and customers. We divide the journey map into four segments: three for the customer, and one for the front-end team member.
End-to-end Customer Journey
Customer Journey Before Checkout
Though customers may spend the majority of their time in-store before they reach checkout, that segment of the experience is largely breakdown-free because the experience matches their mental model of any grocery store.
Customer Journey During Checkout
When customers reach checkout, they encounter systems and concepts specific to Giant Eagle. Customers face a large number of decisions in a short period of time, leading to higher likelihood of errors and frustration.
Cashier Journey During Checkout
Cashiers experience the most friction at the same point in their journey - when processing produce that lacks a barcode.
Having to enter a PLU number or look up produce in the digital catalog introduces opportunities for error and adds steps that introduce longer delays and frustration for both the customer and the cashier.
Secondary Research
Competitive Analysis
We researched strategies that Giant Eagle’s competitors were currently deploying in their stores to improve the checkout experience.
Quantitative Analysis from Giant Eagle
To supplement our field research with quantitative data, we requisitioned internal datasets from Giant Eagle’s Inventory Management team. We analyzed factors such as revenue loss from inaccurately entering produce information at checkout in order to understand which variables had the greatest impact on the efficiency, accuracy, and profitability of the checkout system.
Core Insights
Checking out produce requires scattered knowledge of products and procedures that is not easily attainable for customers and employees alike.
#1
Giant Eagle checkout systems present usability and accessibility challenges to customers, which hampers their ability to complete the checkout process efficiently.
#2
The leading source of checkout frustration is the difficulty of checking out produce at self-checkout stations, independently and without errors.
#3
While customers prefer manned lanes to check out produce, front-end team members face many of the same challenges that shoppers do during self-checkout.
REDEFINING THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
How might we lessen frustration and anxiety for customers, and reduce opportunities for errors in the produce checkout experience?
Opportunity Identification
Giant Eagle stores have to consider not only the checkout variables that all brick-and-mortar stores share, but they have an additional challenge: produce.
Unlike other items in the store that can be checked out simply by scanning a barcode, produce items require customers at the checkout platform to record additional variables, such as weight or specific type.
There are many opportunities for errors, which the existing system compounds rather than resolves. The difficulty involved with checking out produce accentuates friction in all aspects of the checkout system.
Product Requirements
User Experience
The solution should help customers enjoy the purchase experience, and does not inflict any additional stress during the checkout process.
The produce-buying workflow should be efficient and intuitive for customers to understand and navigate.
Customers should be able to use the solution reliably to handle variability that comes with buying produce.
Human Factors
Customers should be able to identify produce name and price with ease and without any assistance.
Customers should be able to checkout produce at any of the checkout options, without ambiguity or assistance.
Any customer demographic and staff members should be able to handle the solution with ease.
Ideation
The team generated over 100 ideas to address usability, accessibility, and checkout workflow challenges uncovered by our insights and guided by the product requirements that we created.
Evaluating Concepts
From our initial solution ideation pool, we narrowed our focus to 5 different concepts. These were chosen on the merits of their ability to solve as many user pain points as possible, based on how well they met the product requirements.
While each concept may vary in physical form, they all aim to automate the functional steps of identifying, weighing, and pricing produce as much as possible.
Re-designing the User Flow
Testing the Prototype
Due to COVID-19, we decided to conduct remote user tests via Zoom and made a figma prototype of the workflow by simulating the store experience with our proposed concept.
In testing out the concept with Giant Eagle customers, we learned what was most important to them:
It remains important that customers get to pick out their own produce.
Customers change their mind and want to be able to put items back in case they may no longer want it.
They liked it when they were no longer tasked with having to remember produce names and weigh the produce themselves.
Summarized User Feedback
Prototype Testing #2
We identified issues from the last prototype of the solution proposed, and addressed each of the points of user feedback to ensure that the solution proposed is:
Intuitive and easy to adopt for customers
Ensured minimal effort from front-end staff members to maintain the system
Has minimal steps to checkout and integrates interfaces which reduce cognitive load on users
Requires least amount of staff assistance at final checkout for produce items
We then tested this modified flow for further improvement with 4 customers.
What we Heard from Customers
Testing the new workflow with customers validated the changes we made to the prototype flow:
Using this system I would feel pretty good! It’s easier and faster!
This is modest and practical, nothing wizbang so easy to learn!
I’m definitely glad that I don’t have to weigh [produce] or remember any [produce] names!
FINAL DESIGN
ProduceUp
ProduceUp explores the factors that are important and necessary for customers and front-end team members to have a stress-free produce checkout experience.
How it works
#1 Pick the Produce
At the shelf, customers pick up the desired amount of produce. Once they start picking up items, a button at the base of the shelf starts glowing softly.
#3 Easy Checkout
The barcode can be scanned by cashiers or at the self-checkout, like any non-produce items in the store, leaving no opportunities for errors with produce name/type or PLU codes.
#2 Print Barcode
Once done picking produce, tap the button under that produce shelf. The smart shelf will print out a barcode sticker, with information on the weight and price of the produce they picked up.
#4 Easy Return at Checkout
After the customer or cashier scans a produce barcode, the screen will show the option to re-weigh the produce in case the customer wants to change the quantity before proceeding.
Details
Island Shelves
The island shelves are the independent modules located in the produce section.
Each standard module consists of 4 trays with a load sensor embedded within each, which is connected to a push button that starts glowing when the customer begins picking and once pushed, recalibrates the load sensor and prints the barcode for the items picked.
Wall Shelves
The wall shelves are modules to store produce along the walls that also has a roof on top for accommodating the conduits and water spray for produce items, and essentially has the same hardware components and functionality as island shelves.
All sensors linked through Arduino code to the Giant Eagle database which can be updated as required over time.
Execution Plan
Implementation Roadmap
Measuring Success in the Pilot Phase
Reflection and Key Takeaways
Our proposal was well received by the head of innovation and business development at Giant Eagle and we also heard positive comments from Giant Eagle customers who regularly buy produce in stores.
For me, this project was a great learning experience which allowed me to apply what I learnt in theory about integrated product development by exposing me to an end-to-end process working in collaboration with a team of individuals with diverse professional and cultural backgrounds to solve a real world challenge.