Introduction

Scan and Go technology and its impact on customers shopping experience:

• Does scan-and-go and its mobile integration enhance customers shopping experience?
• Does the mobile application improve on the retailer provided device?
• Is it possible to improve on the current application to allow for an improvement in customers shopping experiences?

Aims

• Investigate the impact that the Scan and Go technology has on customer shopping experiences.
• Is it a better solution compared to using regular checkouts and self-service?
• Positive & Negative impacts it has on customers.
• Investigate the UX of retailer device compared to the mobile device.

Objectives

A schedule was created of all the objectives for the entire dissertation project.

Primary Research

Survey:

• Created in Google Forms.
• Both quantitative (yes or no questions) and qualitative data (how, why questions).
• Sampling strategy - people who go shopping, given to family, friends and distributed across social media.
• Data was downloaded into excel documents.
• Power BI was used to visualise the data and filter the data.
• 222 responses collected.

Secondary Research

Literature Review

• An evaluation of the existing literature on the topic was conducted.
• 15-20 literature sources were evaluated

Development

Prototype Development

• An agile approach was used.
• 3 different prototype iterations (1 low fidelity & 2 high fidelity).
• Heuristic Evaluation and Cognitive Walkthrough were conducted.
• Feedback on first high fidelity to test the usability and learnability (survey).

Literature Review findings

Negative impact on the retailer and customer user experience:

• Customers having anxiety e.g. fear of making mistakes reuslting in accidental theft.
• Privacy and security concerns with signing up to use the application.
• Reliability of the application
• Uncomfortable and difficult to use whilst shopping
• Increased opportunity for theft.
• Validation audits/quality checks reuslting in an unpleasant experience.

Literature Review findings

Positive impact on the customer user experience:

• Faster shopping experience/checkout.
• Greater control over shopping. You can bag as you go, no rush to pack like you do on regular checkouts. You do more of the work yourself which is liked by many.
• Improved overview of your shopping, can monitor you spendings as you go.

Development

The prototypes were created to answer the 3rd question for whether the current solution can be improved on to provide a better user experience. One low fidelity and two high fidleity prototypes were created.

The development of the prototype aimed to reduce the following core issues identified from research:

• Process Anxiety - has an effect on the adoption of the technology.
• Reliability
• Accessiblity Improvements - the current applications (ASDA, Sainsbury's) do not have strong enough accessibility settings. The app needed to be more customisable to tailor to each individual user's needs.
• Improve adoption of technology – adding additional features to encourage more users to adopt the mobile application. Participants from the survey had stated how they didn't see a benefit of the mobile applications over the in-store device.

Improvements were made on the existing Scan and Go applications e.g. ASDA, Sainsbury's and M&S application.

• The existing applications have shopping list integration to allow customers to tick off items as they shop. Improvements were made to this:
• Basic and Advanced shopping lists.
• Ability to share shopping lists with other users.
• Greater visibility of spending and shopping list progress.

Further Improvements:

• Budgeting
• Notification page created and improved notification and feedback for completing actions.
• Ability to automatically tick items off shopping list when scanned.
• Save function for trolley.
• Improved product search, store map and pings for searching for items in store.
• Improvements to checkout, added a 'my activity' page which aims to reduce anxiety using the app.

Low Fidelity Prototype

The first low fidelity prototype was created to test ideas, designs and concepts.

First High Fidelity Prototype

This prototype incorporated the designs an improved on the low fidelity prototype. The low fidelity prototype did include new features that aimed to improve the experience. The high fidelity has incorporated these new features in a prototype that closely matches what the real application would look like.

The existing applications have shopping list integration to allow customers to tick off items as they shop. Improvements were made to this:

• The advanced shopping list was created. Can add specifc products from the sotre into the list.
• The total of the shopping list is given as well which benefits users if they care about budgeting when shopping.

Ability to share shopping lists with other users.

• This feature is aimed at improving adoption of the application with families. If a family has multiple people doing the home shopping, they are probably using different devices or accounts.

Users can set a budget before their shop now, improves real-time overview of spending

• This feature is aimed at improving adoption of the application with families. If a family has multiple people doing the home shopping, they are probably using different devices or accounts.

• A major issue identified from both primary and secondary research was the validation audits and the anxiety it brought to customers.
• Users are given a notice telling them they may have to have some items checked before paying. This improves communication between the customers and the retailer.

Users are provided with documentation on how to use all the functionalities

This is the main trolley page for when shopping. Users use their camera to scan products just a usual. The user can set a budget for there shop and keep track of spending as they go. See below.

Shopping List Integration - If a shopping list is selected, the user can see a progress bar telling how much progress they’ve made and how many products on the list are left. When a shopping list is completed, the progress bar is full and all items are ticked

Automatically tick off items as they’re scanned. Users can still manually tick if they pick different items. This improves the ease of use as users don’t have to keep switching between their list and trolley to tick items of, which can be tedious.

An improvement was made to the search function with the addition of a map and waypoint. Previously, the existing application would only give the shelf location which was quite broad, now users can get the exact point in the shop for where the product is located.

• With the existing system there was no feedback when you reduced the quantity of an item, no indication or notification to tell the user what action had been done. This is a problem as people are holding their phones throughout their shop and may accidentally mis tap which could lead to accidental theft.
• You can see the minus icon appear when quantity is reduced. Vibration is another additional function that could be added to this.

Notifications were additionally added to improve the feedback of user actions, The notifications could additionally be viewed on the notification page.

• The activity page was created to reduce the problem of anxiety and the risk of customers accidental theft. The activity page gives the user information on all product scans, removes and quantity changes in their trolley from the entire shopping trip. This can reduce anxiety and the fear of not scanning items as they can check they entire behaviour. If a user accidently removed or reduced the quantity of the product, they would know by checking their activity.
• With the view trolley page, users have a dedicated section where they view it only, without the worry of accidentally deleting or adjusting a product quantity.

A page for digital receipts was added, once users have paid at the Scan and Go till, a digital receipt is added to the account.

An option to adjust the text size was given with 3 different options.

Heuristic Evaluation of first high fidelity prototype

A heuristic evaluation of the high-fidelity prototype was conducted to test the usability of the proposed solution. The heuristic evaluation was mostly positive with the application achieving most of the 10 Nielsen usability heuristics. There is room for improvements with regards to providing feedback better feedback for when using bottom navigation and there were consistency issues identified. There was also a flexibility issue identified with giving the user the option to turn off the turning of the camera when on the trolley, this prevents mis scanning items and give control to user. These problems were minor and can be fixed quite quickly.

Cognitive Walkthrough of first high fidelity prototype

Using the persona that was created, a cognitive walkthrough was carried out with task of a completing a shopping trip, testing the usabiltiy and learnability of the prototype.

User Persona

Persona of a customer created for carrying out a cognitvie walkthrough.

User Feedback on first high fidelity prototype

. Users were asked to complete different tasks and then complete a survey asking them about their experience using the application. Users were asked what they had liked the most about the prototype. One respondent had said they liked the automatic shopping list ticking the most and another had like the budget and share shopping list the most. These were both new functionalities that were created in the prototype.

User Feedback

Recommended Improvements

• Have menu icon stay in the same place when on trolley page.
• The camera for scanning is too small.
• One partcipant was unsure whether you can change the order of items in shopping list, you can't.
• Text too small and unreadable on tutorial pop up.

Second High Fidelity Prototype

After creating the survey and conducting a cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation, improvements to further improve the user experience of the Scan and Go mobile application had been done.

Feedback has been added to the bottom navigation buttons. In this example, clicking on shopping list will make the shopping list button change green.

An accessiblity improvement to allow users to choose to have the camera bigger or have the trolley take up more space on the page was added.

Camera zoom was added for when scanning products. The user can choose a zoom setting that they find the easiest and fastest to scan products and can be adjusted at any point. This aims to make the scanning match the ease of use of scanning with the retailer device.

Improvement made to the name of the navigation buttons. Trolley button renamed to 'myshop' and the list button renamed to 'shopping list'

Increased the text size for the tutorial popup as text size was previously too small.

The final improvement added the ability to change the order of items within the shopping list. This improvement was implemented by adding an up and down arrow besides the item to move it up or down the list.