PROBLEM STATEMENT

Despite Trader Joe’s having a dedicated and enthusiastic customer base, the brand lacks a mobile app to enhance the shopping experience and meet the needs of its users in a convenient, digital format.
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OUTCOME

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PROCESS

EMPATHIZE

Our team set realistic research goals to define our scope for the project and sent a survey to 34 people to answer questions about their general affinities about their Trader Joe's shopping experience.

Questions Included:

1. What features would you like to see included in a Trader Joe's mobile app?
2. If you currently use an app associated with an in-person shopping experience, what do you use it for? (e.g., browsing products, checking promotions, making purchases)
3. Have you ever visited the Trader Joe's website before? If you haven't and would like to, you can here: https://www.traderjoes.com/home
4. Does the aesthetic and personality of Trader Joe's make it more attractive to you compared to other stores?

We also completed a general competitive analysis to understand what makes e-commerce app experience attractive to the general public.
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DEFINE

To synthesize our findings from both the survey results and competitive analysis, we employed strategic customer research exercises (Kano Analysis, Goals Grid, Affinity Diagram, Root Cause Analysis) to get a deep understanding on prioritization and value of features that students expressed a need for in their survey responses.

Kano analysis was my favorite one to understand the relationship between what the user finds important and what the user would be satisfied with:

IDEATE

My absolute favorite part of the design process — balancing thinking outside of the box but also creating designs that maintain a sense of familiarity for the users.

LESSONS

Prioritize the user!!!

Early in our project, we found ourselves straying away from our user’s needs and following our own design and feature preferences. We had to take a step back, reevaluate, and conduct further research to understand user pain points.

Find common ground when working collaboratively

We learned how to operate as a team using each team member's individual strengths & weaknesses. At the same time, I learned that it's okay to have differing opinions but it's important to back up design choices with data-driven rationale!