Your Personal Grocery Shopping Assistance

Products: Echo Show Devices, Amazon website/app, and Fresh & Whole Foods Market
Duration: 2020 – 2021
What I did: Product strategy, task flow, wireframe, pattern/system design, user research, prototype, and presentation.
Co-lead designer: Miriam Ferhut

Main objective
Grocery shopping is perceived as a repetitive and time consuming weekly chores for customers. Team proposed a new end to end voice shopping experience which enable Alexa to become a true grocery assistant. This end to end experience not only enable Alexa to capture and checkout customer’s groceries orders, it also reduce customer’s grocery shopping time by consolidating planning steps through a centralized grocery personal hub to quickly choose items and build their cart more efficiently.

My role
I co-lead the project with another UX designer to establish and ship end-to-end grocery shopping framework on voice enabled screen devices. Together, we worked closely with product managers, designers, and engineers across voice, patterns, and science teams to defined a voice enable grocery shopping experience spans across needs capturing, cart building, and checkout experiences.

Outcome/metrics

Contributed and tested 5+ new patterns, components, and templates to a central Multi-model shopping design library.
As of Q1 2021, 108k+ organic customers have been doing their Grocery shopping through Alexa (with no marketing or campaign).

What’s next/learnings

It all **started** when…

Design team was asked to re-imagine a grocery shopping experience which would enable customers to order grocery by simply asking – “Alexa, order my groceries.“

However, here are some challenges…

Alexa’s groceries prediction is not yet accurate enough to meet customer’s needs.
Customer’s intention to ask Alexa to help with grocery shopping is not very clear.
Grocery shopping experience on Echo show devices was still in very early stage with no basic functionality in browsing, cart building, nor checking out.

The image on the right captures the experience in 2019, when customers asked Alexa to add yogurt to their grocery cart.

Teams took a step back to better define goals for Alexa… and decided to focus on these 2 opportunities :

Customers found it to be a cumbersome and scattered process to plan and capture groceries needs for each trip
- grocery cart size is typically ~13–30 items per cart
Customers found it to be a repetitive and time consuming process to re-build a similar cart each time
- 70% grocery items are re-order items per cart

To address these pain points from customers, team proposed to 1)reduce frictions during grocery planning, 2)reduce repetition during cart building process. See below for proposed solutions.

01. What if Alexa can–

**Capture customer’s need and directly build their cart** to help customers skipping or reducing frictions during the grocery planning process?

In 2021, team launched the an end to end Voice Enabled Grocery Shopping framework on all Echo Show devices.

With this experience, customers can now directly ask Alexa to build grocery cart for them anytime anywhere. Alexa will suggest item based on customer’s shopping history such as past purchases or favorite items from Fresh and Whole Foods Market.

It not only save extra steps for customers to manually draw down items on a shopping list and build grocery cart from scratch; they can also build their cart anytime anywhere throughout the week. And whenever customers are ready to place their order, the needs will be ready for them to review and checkout with Alexa.

On top of building a basic framework for voice shopping for grocery, we also explored an experience which enable customers to quickly build their cart through a centralized personal grocery suggestion hub.

02. What if Alexa can–

**Personalize and customize grocery suggestions** to help customers avoid rebuilding their grocery cart from scratch every single time?

The CX that the team has designed is utilizing the proactive grocery shopping service. The service proactively recommend personalized grocery items that customers are most likely going to order at the moment through their recent shopping activities.

For short term, the signals that the teams are starting with are purchase history and shopping list; In the future, the teams are planning to extending signals to deals, trending near you, popular items, and etc.

Our north star is to help customers save time and take the cognitive load off them by automatically building their cart with their grocery staples so they don’t have to and shipping it to them at a time that best fits their schedule.

Through this CX, the goal is for Alexa to learn customer’s behavior over time and suggest more accurate grocery staples. In the future, customer will no longer need to manually configured the cart.