Case study: Franprix’s recipes
A case study on improving Franprix’s grocery e-shopping experience
Our challenge was to improve the experience of Franprix.fr an online grocery shopping website. In those days of covid-19 lockdown, more people started to order their groceries online. We took this collateral effect and turned it into an opportunity to improve their experience by identifying a common pain point and then, creating a feature to solve it.
I worked with and , 2 very smart designers with very different characters: Octavia is calm and focused, Julia is very rigorous and open-minded. I am an idealistic who diverge a lot, so the ingredients’ combination was right for our dish.
/the approach/
We started to do some research about the online grocery market and competitors. Based on it, we assumed that users want to save time, they are afraid of out-of-stock items and they think online groceries is more expensive than physical.
We wanted to confirm these assumptions by running interviews.
It was around 4PM when we really started to draft our interview guide. It has been long to discuss and agree because we were working remotely due to the Covid-restrictions. A pinch of Zoom and a zest of collaborative Mural boards were really helpful.
Also, we had a dynamic team flow & using a template from a previous project considerably fastened the process as we didn’t need to structure our thinking from scratch.
We interviewed 6 persons, the results were surprising. Our assumptions were false! We discovered that users’ main concern was not primarily saving time or being afraid of out-of-stock items as we thought, but they don’t trust the freshness of online groceries and they think it’s complicated to create a shopping list.
We collected a lot of other insights and with the help of an affinity diagram, we were able to cluster their issues and voted for the most interesting and accessible to solve:
What makes people reluctant to buy fresh food online?
“How might we make the person shop all her organic stuff at the same place?”
“How might we make the user feel confident and trustful about the shopping list?”
Based on our researches and interviews, we created a persona : Marie. Her main motivations are to eat organic because it tastes better and she wants to cook and spend quality time with her relatives.
Her goal is to see how fresh are the products and save time but she is frustrated because it is difficult to find quality products online and trust its freshness at delivery. Another critical need for her is to buy all her groceries on the same platform.
We can see on her journey map that she has 3 pain points. But we focused on the main pain one which is the product selection.
Our problem statement: Marie -the urban creative with a community mind- needs a way to buy all her eco-friendly groceries (fresh and dry) on the same online platform because she is fed up with wasting her time going to different places to buy her ingredients for cooking.
We will know that we reached our goal if we see a significant augmentation (50%) of fresh product sales online and check with a NPS with this persona over the next 6 months.
Monday morning we had a fun session sketching ideas, 8 fun ideas in 8 minutes.
We voted for the idea that was most attainable and realistic to improve the experience for Franprix’s users: a Recipes & ingredient list features.
Marie will be able to pick a recipe of her choice and a list will appear with all the ingredients needed. She will then be able to modify every quantity or even the product choice of each ingredients.
To test our idea with another group of users, we then created a mid-fi prototype with Sketch and Marvel combined of an apple pie recipe :
With that feature, we solve the problems of:
- Being overwhelmed by the quantity of choices
- Finding all her ingredients at once to cook eco-friendly and fresh meals
Bringing a sense of service and realness to tackle the virtual task of e-shopping will convey the idea that Franprix is listening to its niche customers and proposing solutions according to their specific taste and lifestyle.
We could go another extra mile regarding eco-conscious concerns by adding information about the product: expiration date, picking date of the fruits, traceability and storytelling to gain more trust and create an emotional bound.
The new user flow to shop by choosing a recipe first avoids the loops that the user usually takes to find each products.
/The results/
A lot of good feedbacks such as “a recipe page will save me a lot of time” and “it makes me want to look at more recipes to cook more” validated the interest for our solution.
To improve, our testers also suggested: to show the total price of the recipe earlier at selection phase, an express check-out button and an ‘add to favorite recipes’ features.
To continue on that project, the next steps would be:
- Validate feasibility with logistics and tech teams,
- Create the high fidelity prototype and run usability tests,
- Launch the feature :)
- Make a quantitative survey to measure clients’ satisfaction about the new feature, but also to analyse the quantitative data to see if there is a significant augmentation (about 50%) of fresh products sales online.
And for the long term, when the feature is successful and useful for the clients :
- Add nutritional informations,
- Import recipes from other websites,
- Receive recipes suggestions and the option to save them.
Thank you for reading our case study.
Have a good apple pie.
