Grocery Shopping - Generative Research

March 2019

Skills Used

• Generative Research

• Working with UX Research Team

• Writing Interview Script

• Conducting User Interviews

• Transcribing User Interviews

• Contextual Inquiry

• Analyzing Qualitative Data

• Presenting Research Insights

generative research objective

The Research team consisted of two other UX Researchers and myself. For this design challenge we chose to explore peoples’ reasons, reactions, and guiding principles to understand their grocery shopping experiences.

Qualifying the user

We chose to target people who grocery shop in the Austin metro area. Additionally, we focused on people who do their grocery shopping in-store. We planned to interview either in-person, by phone call, or video conference. Due to limited resources we were unable to provide incentives to interviewees. In addition to the 5 interviews, we conducted a contextual inquiry of someone grocery shopping.

Writing Interview Script

We journey mapped hypothetical situations of someone going to the grocery store. From the journey map we distinguished three distinct phases of grocery shopping we wanted to research; 1. Preparation before going to the grocery store, 2. Shopping while at the grocery store, and 3. Experiences after leaving the grocery store.

After refining our research questions we entered them into Google Sheets so we could enter transcribed interviews collectively.

Analyzing Interviews

Once all responses were recorded into the spreadsheet our group converged to analyze the data.

We used two methods of analysis:

1. Stop Light Method

   Each of us color coded the interviewee responses for each questions asked. If we felt the responses were similar we would make the cell green, if they were different we would make it red. For interesting responses we would code them yellow. To promote discussion between the research team we did this activity individually and then came back to discuss any differences in our color coding.

2. Qualitative Coding System

   We then used a coding system of "Goals (Green), Tasks (Blue), Beliefs (Red), Feelings (purple)” to mine our qualitative data and discover users’reasons, reactions, and guiding principles when grocery shopping.

   Then we transcribed the responses onto sticky notes of coordinating colors. (Due to lack of green and red sticky notes we improvised yellow stickies for Goals (Green) and Beliefs (Red). Doing this allowed us to affinity map our qualitative data.

Affinity Mapping

Insights

As it tends to do, analysis and synthesis of our generative research led to more questions:

• Shoppers make lists as a work around to make their in-store experience more efficient and save time. However, with curbside pick-up now available at many grocery stores, people still go in the grocery store to do their shopping. Why is this?

• The ultimate goal of grocery shopping is to purchase items. When items are out of stock, shoppers become frustrated -- leading to a negative grocery shopping experience. How can grocery stores alleviate shoppers’ frustrations?

Retrospective

Overall the research went well. I enjoyed taking a step back and getting to explore a broader topic such as grocery shopping. I found it beneficial working with a team to get more interviews done in a short amount of time. During the contextual inquiry I wish we brought our interview script with us so we could reference it when asking the user questions as they shopped. Additionally, I think in some of the interviews we could have dug deeper into interviewee’s reasonings, reactions, and guiding principles by asking follow up questions.

I will continue to audio record interviews and transcribe them using otto.ai. It saved me so much time by not transcribing the whole interview myself. I enjoyed analyzing qualitative data with a team, especially during the “coding”. I found them to be a valuable reference while deciding if a piece of data should be coded as a Goal, Task, Belief, or Feeling. Additionally, while stop lighting we were able to compare whether we thought answers were similar or different which led to insightful discussions about our data.

I wish we had more time to synthesize our qualitative data. I feel that if we had more time we would be able to get to more valuable insights. Despite the time constraints we were able to get to one insight which spurred additional questions that we could leverage into future research and problem space exploration.