Woolworths Group is the largest supermarket chain in Australia (in terms of market share), hiring more than 32,000 employees. However, it was facing stiff competition from other growing supermarket chains, including the Coles Group. Woolworths approached us to come up with innovative ideas to address its customers needs more effectively, whilst also ensuring the innovation generated business value for the organisation.

We chose to approach this journey through the design thinking process - following the Stanford d.school model.

Empathy

In order to empathise with our customer base, my team and I conducted a number of different research methods to understand our consumer base, and the customer experience. These methods have been detailed below:

Research questions were focused around the following:

1. Understanding the typical process when consumers bought (or interacted) with the supermarket
2. Understanding challenges that consumers faced
3. Understanding current mediums that consumers use for grocery shopping
4. Understanding consumer preferences when choosing which store to shop from
5. Understanding how experiences differed based on type of customer segment
6. Ideas and emotions that are associated with supermarket shopping

We then collated these insights using affinity mapping, as well as a customer journey map, personas and storyboards.

Insights that we discovered included:

• Supermarket shopping was often associated with confusion and frustration - largely due to store layouts being inconsistent and often restricting movement
• Consumers often spent a lot of time at the supermarket looking through ingredients to assess whether products met their dietary needs. This in turn would create blockages and frustrations for other shoppers.
• Consumers preferred efficiency and speed when it came to the supermarket experience.
• Consumers often found it difficult to find the right product, and felt ashamed of having to find staff in order to find a product.

Storyboard of a typical shopping experience

Example of a spatial analysis

Define

Based on these insights, we sought to define our problem statement. When we conducted the "5 Why's Exercise" - we realized the following.

Users would often find it difficult to understand product information, and thus would try to look through product information (thus blocking aisles.) This would lead to logistical issues such as crowding, injuries due to collisions with shopping utilities, and a general feeling of overwhelmingness.

When we did additional research, we found that a significant percentage of people would look through ingredients to understand if products met their dietary needs. Thus, we redefined our problem space to focus on this segment.

From a business perspective, we decided to focus on the vegan consumer segment for a number of different reasons. These include:

1. Australians with a vegetarian diet make up 11.7% of the population (Roy Morgan, 2016)
2. Australia is the third-fastest growing vegan market in the world - worth $136 million, expected to reach $215 million by 2020. (SMH, 2016) 
3. In 2015, the packaged vegan food market was worth almost $136 million and is projected to reach $215 million by 2020, an expected annual growth rate of 9.6%.

Background

Empathy (again)

We then went through the design research phase again, focusing our research on vegan consumers through 5 interviews, 215 survey results, and extensive internet research within online communities. Our findings indicated that some of the most common issues vegans faced included:

1. Being able to quickly judge whether a product was vegan or not. Although some products adopted a "vegan" symbol - this was not widely adopted, and often certain products would be vegan-friendly without the symbol.
2. Many products labelled as "vegan" are highly priced, so consumers tried to search for "secretly vegan" products
3. Many Vegans largely valued convenience, and so would shop at speciality vegan stores (even if it was marked up)

An iconographic customer journey of the vegan shopping experience

Examples of existing products used by vegans and their constraints

Define (again)

We then redefined our problem statement to focus on product decision making for Vegans - How can Vegans easily assess and make decisions about their purchases?

After conducting a feasibility assessment, we concluded that the most feasible idea to prototype (and develop) was a mobile application that would include 4 key features:

1. Personalisation
2. Community
3. Information
4. Reliability

Ideation

Using techniques such as brainstorming, we started to ideate for our design solution through brainstorming and bodystorming techniques. We then started sketching for some of our ideas.

After ideating, we then conducted a feasibility assessment - where we analysed different aspects of our solution (including business aspects.) These include:

1. Product costs - approximate development complexity
2. Integration with existing offerings
3. Operational impact
4. Scalability
5. Marketing needs
6. Material science and design

After conducting a feasibility assessment, we concluded that the most feasible idea to prototype (and develop) was a mobile application that would include 4 key features:

1. Personalisation: The ability to input dietary needs, and scan barcodes to instantly judge whether a product was "safe" or not
2. Community: A forum, where community members could engage with each other (and recommend products to purchase)
3. Information: A "recipe guide" designed by influencers - again, to inspire consumers to purchase products whilst also engaging with them as a brand
4. Reliability: News and updates

Example of application user flow

Prototyping

We then carried out prototyping - starting with low-fidelity prototyping including storyboards and paper prototyping, before moving to medium and high fidelity prototyping.

Some of our prototyping screens can be viewed below:

All screens can be found on https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3uy9FCzI6Y-b1VXRGlRMzNKaDg/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-Hs5odkUggcUODchbES3-rQ

Test

Using contextual surveys, we then tested our design prototype. For the purposes of this project, we were not involved past this stage, and our initial prototype sufficed. Survey results can be found here.

Impact

Woolworths implemented some components of our design solution - albeit in a slightly different format. The components implemented by Woolworths included:

1. An online forum - which can be found here with a special focus on veganism
2. Woolworths also created online content specifically catering to vegans, with suggestions for recipes and the ability to add products - which integrated with their main website.
3. Woolworths also extended their range of plant based foods and allowed shoppers and consumers to be able to "filter" online with that as a criteria - making online shopping much more easier for vegan shoppers