A Grocery Shopping Design Challenge — a UX Case Study of STASH
Designing a product for the end users can be a challenging task that most of the local startups fail do to. Here is a brief overview of how the National Incubation Center helps startups create user centric products.
“Every great design begins with an even better story.”
— Lorinda Mamo, Designer and creative director
If you are a tech founder and development is your forte, look no further — this is a place you need to be. For a founder with business skills who wants to outsource his development, take a few moments to understand how essential your part in the whole process of product design is.
When Muhammad Talha Ali and Sana Liaqat , co-founders Stash started their journey at the National Incubation Center , they were faced with a tough challenge of restarting the product development from scratch. The silver lining to the problem was that through the customized in-depth curriculum sessions and one to one user centric monthly meetings, they were able to initiate their product design with a deep set passion to solve the grocery shopping problems of the local community.
Design Challenge
The founding team came to the National Incubation Center with an idea but now needed to re-investigate how their product would be relevant during the pandemic. Two of their main design problems included:
- To identify the pain points of the shoppers while shopping for groceries especially before, during and beyond covid times.
- Improve the existing grocery shopping experience.
UX Research
The first step was to conduct interviews and survey with more than 50 adults. Through the data gathered, three user personas were created as follows.
- Person with disabilities
- Senior citizen
- Individual from a working class.
The demographic details of the third persona is outlined below.
Findings — What Stash found
Talha and Sana , found that most users now need to evolve their habits of grocery shopping. The context in which they will need to use the Stash app also changed with the onset of the pandemic. This being a positive advantage for Stash, a perk to pick up their product development pace.
Their main pre- covid pain points included:
- A lot of time wasted in visiting the grocery store.
- Difficulty to find parking especially during rush hours causing a lot of frustration.
- A lot of rush and distraction inside the grocery store.
Their main post- covid need included:
- Bringing groceries to the doorstep from the nearest local grocery store
Now the task remained to identify the minimum required features to push out the product within 4 weeks of development. Using the MoScOW method, critical features for launch were evaluated. This feature list was then screened using Impact Effort Analysis.
Rapid Prototyping
Using the key findings and after the user journey mapping, the team set out to rapidly prototype their concept. The process of wireframing was then initiated. Each iteration was followed by increasing the size of the circle of feedback, starting from the closest circle and then moving onto the real users of the app.
Each iteration was tested through usability testing with no more than 5 users, eliminating more than 85% usability issues .
The final iteration was moved towards high fidelity wireframing that was then easy to handoff to the development team.
Way Forward
Startup founders at the National Incubation Center understand that products are continuously evolving — there is no such concept as a final product. Every time you release a product, you come back and reiterate on the evolving customer and business needs.
With each product iteration designed to address the most pressing problems , the business gets stronger and the customers happier.
Currently Stash is operational all over Islamabad and Abbottabad. If you would like convenience at your finger stips, simply follow the steps below to place your first order.
To download stash app, you can use the link below.
Stash App : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.grocery.stash
Happy Stash-ing!
