QuickList

Collaborative List-making Application

QuickList was designed to remove the frustrations of list creation by allowing users to create and share lists with others, provide a simple interface to know who is contributing, and save items or lists for future use.

Contextual Inquiries

Contributors: Catherine Sinow, Dariush Azmoudeh

To start the design process, two colleagues of mine and I interviewed three people to gain insight and context into what motivates them while shopping, as well as what factors may cause frustration leading up to their shopping trip. During the session, we either accompanied participants to the grocery store to take real time notes, or observed as they shopped on InstaCart.

From the data we gathered, the common factor that stood out to me were the challenges they encountered when shopping for other people. This observation inspired me to solve for this problem by designing an app that makes communicating and planning lists more effortless.

Problem Context

Grocery shopping is a universal necessity for many people in the modern world. Whether it’s creating lists, shopping online, or planning dinners with friends and family, people are motivated by a variety of factors to keep their shopping as quick, convenient, and stress-free as possible.

Shopping for more than one person can be stressful and disorganized.
People keep track of their shopping needs in different ways, so sharing lists and needs with others can be complicated and inconvenient.
These limitations can lead to frustration when items are forgotten or requested items sent to others are lost or unread.

Project Vision

The goal of QuickList is to help users spend less time planning and organizing their shopping trips by providing a solution for multiple people to contribute items to lists and meet their shopping needs.

Whether planning a camping trip with friends or a weekly trip of shopping for the family, users will never have to worry about forgetting an item for someone else.

Design Process

Affinity Mapping

Once contextual inquiries were concluded, I created an affinity diagram using key findings and quotes that I organized into the following categories:

Preparing to shop
- Making Lists
Choosing Products
- Why they buy this product
Motivation and Considerations
- Lifestyle
- Convenience

Personas

The data from the interviews were interpreted and organized into an affinity diagram, which provided the context to create a persona, in this case Healthy Heather.
To summarize, this persona focuses not only on her specific needs to shop for brands she trusts, but also the challenges she may face when shopping for other people who may not purchase the same types of items she does.

Context Scenarios

Story boards were created based off of user interview data and persona, which provided context for problems users may face when shopping, as well as how an app can be helpful or offer solutions to those pain points.

These storyboards contributed to feature ideations by:

Providing context of problems and possible solutions a mobile app can offer.
Exploring features that are helpful when shopping for groceries.
Providing insight into considerations people make when shopping for more than one person

UX Visioning

A UX Visioning session was conducted with one other contributor that explored the following ideas:

Challenges to buying groceries online
Considerations when buying for other people
Real-time convenience to update and make changes
Saving and reusing lists from previous weeks
Scenarios allowing multiple users to contribute to a running list

Paper Prototyping

Once features were explored and basic ideations created, remote testing was conducted using a paper prototype and the POP Marvel application. This wireflow chart demonstrates some of the task flows that I planned to create in my prototype.

Note: POP Marvel is an application similar to InVision that facilitates the testing of paper prototyping.

Interpretation and Redesign

After testing the first iteration of task flows on my paper prototype, adding Items to a list became the main focus of the redesign.

Redesign focused on 3 task flows:

Ability to add items manually to the list
Browse items from a predetermined category page
Ability to scan barcodes to import specific items into the list
Focusing on this action helped weed out unnecessary features that could complicate this task.

Digital Prototype

Based on those findings, a mid-fidelity prototype was developed to review improvements made from the paper prototype. The following gallery highlights the most noteworthy findings and improvements.

Annotated Wireframes

Final Thoughts

Keeping task-flows simple and the UI uncluttered was key in users performing tasks successfully.
Further research is needed to asses discoverability of updated features.
Cut back on unnecessary features that may deter users from using app.
Develop screens for browsing categories, saved items, and favorites.
Conduct one more round of tests before finalizing design.