Supermart - Flipkart Grocery

Project overview

India is the sixth-largest grocery market globally and one of the fastest-growing markets for online groceries. Online grocery is expected to be one of the fastest gr­o­wing categories reaching $5 billion in 2020 from $1 billion in 2017, as RedSeer Consulting reported, market research and advisory firm. The online groceries sector is a key battleground for online retailers because of the high order volumes and repeats purchases of groceries by customers.

Flipkart, India’s leading e-commerce marketplace, launched ‘Flipkart Supermart’; its online grocery store for Bangalore customers, in 2017 on its mobile app and website. This category is gradually scaling in other cities across India as well.

The study aims to understand users’ grocery buying processes and evaluate the usability aspects of the mobile app and desktop designs.

Team members: 1 Product Designer, 2 Product managers and 2 Software developers
My role: User researcher

Timeline: 4 weeks

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Flipkart.

Research overview

Before devising the methodology and designing tasks, it was important for me to understand the Supermart category performance in Bangalore. I studied the metrics with a data analyst who gave me a walkthrough of the problems observed during the quantitative analysis. The analysis helped me decide the tasks and focus areas in the online grocery shopping journey.

Research objectives

• To gain an understanding of users’ grocery ordering process.
• Evaluate and gather insights around the usability of different touchpoints in the shopping journey:

• Gather an understanding of users’ comprehension, perceptions, and preferences while interacting with Flipkart grocery.

Methodology

After finalizing on research objectives, an end-to-end usability evaluation of the online grocery experience was decided with 12 participants (8 mobile app users and 4 desktop users) which comprised of :

• Interview sessions with each participant (60–90 minutes), which included: a short briefing, a pre-shopping interview, and a think-aloud task* on a test phone/laptop.
• A 10–15 minutes telephonic interview on post-order experience was conducted after the participant received the order.

Task*: Users were asked to buy bi-weekly/monthly groceries for themselves from Flipkart. Users went through the entire flow: Search or browse → a selection of items → order → payment → order confirmation. A gift voucher worth 1500 INR was provided to order items on the supermart platform.

Participant recruitment

Our participants were recruited from 2 cohorts:

1. Flipkart regular grocery shoppers
2. Other app grocery shoppers — Amazon, Big Basket, Grofers.

These participants were recruited with the help of an agency. A recruiting screener was shared with the vendor agency, which can get a list of potential participants, sift through the responses, schedule appropriate participants, and manage their compensation for us.

Participants interacting with app. The audio/video was recorded using webcam and Ziggy with timer for analysis.

Data analysis

I started the analysis in the following steps:

• After each session, I scheduled debriefing sessions with the designers and product managers. Each member has to share their notes with the group of what they observed in the sessions.
• Next, I watched the session recordings and went through the transcripts based on the interview protocol to make notes of whatever we missed in our debriefing discussions.
• Finally, I examined the notes to find patterns and coded them. I divided the whole shopping journey into three phases: Basket building, Ordering, and post order. Using the clusters, insights were generated in the shopping journey, and opportunities were created.

I included supporting video clips and quotations while assembling the report.

Affinity clustering was used to come up with different groups.

Insights and opportunities

Impact

Some of the insights with design changes (App and desktop):

Research impact

• The research recommendations led to design changes, feature concept changes and contributed to the product roadmap, providing opportunities for new features in the grocery category.
• Flipkart further launched this grocery category ‘Supermart’ in 4 more cities across India (Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai).
• The design changes lead to an increase in total conversion by an ambitious 120bps.
• UXR had became a strategic partner of product team.

Design collaboration with Product designer.

My learnings

• Evaluation is great way to uncover opportunities and get a buyin from stakeholders for future collaboration.
• Colloboration with key stakeholders in every step of research process makes easier to implement insights in product design.
• Logging notes aids in commencing research analysis.

Following work

Further, studies were conducted on the following domains: retention & membership, offers, recommendation, Supermart homepage.