Introducing Social Grocer

How might we reimagine online grocery services to be healthy by design?

Nearly 40% of Americans now buy some of their groceries through online services like Instacart, Shipt, and Uber Eats. Younger Americans do at even higher rates. As life seems to get busier and busier, the efficiency of online services — which you can use at any time of day or night and which save you a trip to the supermarket — holds increasing appeal.

Online grocery services create opportunities to support health because home-cooked meals are typically healthier than those consumed from restaurants (especially fast food restaurants). But the ingredients people order matter as well, as does choosing fresh ingredients over processed foods and prepared meals. There are opportunities in choice architecture to shape the online shopping experience in ways that lead to healthier diets.

One of the downsides of online grocery shopping is that it eliminates the casual social interaction that comes from shopping at a grocery store or a supermarket. In addition, social media has an influence on purchasing decisions, so another design opportunity is to bring more social interaction and engagement into the online experience.

We wanted to explore these and other possibilities for health-focused online grocery services, so we challenged Stevie Lemons, Louise Lu, Varun Narayanswamy and Ivy Tseng, a team of graduate students from the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program at the University of Washington, to create a speculative service design for their capstone project. Check out their work — the final design, their process for immersing themselves in the topic and generating a solution, and the research they produced along the way.