Social Grocer
Fill Your Cart, Feed Your Friendships
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. You can see their work below — their final design, their process for immersing themselves in the topic and generating a solution, and the research they produced along the way.
Work Products
Social Grocer: Overview Video
Watch the team’s design, Social Grocer, in action in this short video.
Key Features
See how the team designed different features, such as exploring food items, live shopping with friends and family, and making sense of nutrition information.
Research Report
Learn how young adults make decisions when shopping for groceries online: What do they pay attention to? What are their perceptions of healthy eating? What are their relationships with food? How does context influence their choices?
Process Slides
See how the team approached the task, from their goals and principles they established, the ideas they generated, the feedback from user testing, the rationale for their design choices, and their reflections and takeaways.
Task Flows and Key Paths
Dig deeper into Social Grocer’s design with flows that show the information architecture, the user journeys and the screen designs.