ALDI Online Shopping
Project Story
In a team with another designer, our main ideas on how to help the business is to add a Click n Collect and Delivery service, improve the IA on the existing website and maintain ALDI’s low cost business model.
With our research we wanted to find out how the leaders in the supermarket industry operate and the issues users would face. To help keep us on track, personas and journey maps were created to make sure we're designing for the right user. A working Figma prototype was created with multiple rounds of testing and reiterating.
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Maintain ALDI’s key business Model whilst delivering great service
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Create a secure platform for users to complete their online shopping
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Make it easy for users to swiftly collect their groceries in one location
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Save time spent in store and waiting check out lines
Current assumptions and issues
Existing website is hard to navigate through
Lack of services and help was another issue with the current website.
The IA was not the correct representation of the company and what the company was offering
Roles
This project was made during the immersive UX course at General Assembly. I was part of a group of two people in 2.5 weeks. I engaged in all steps from research, synthesis, ideation, sketching and prototyping on figma.
Difference between the supermarket giants
Take aways
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ALDI holds 13.2% of the supermarket shares
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Delivery Fee's are costly and there's always minimum spend
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% of Online Sales double in the past few months
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Delivery service is too expensive to run for ALDI
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Click & Collect doesn't exist yet/ seems like an inexpensive opportunity
After finding out ALDI is the 3rd largest supermarket store in Australia, we wanted to capatilize on this and provide an extra service for their well known brand.
It was slightly concerning to find out there's always a delivery fee unless you spend an excess of $200 PER SHOP! to recieve free shipping. This lead us to think running logistics and all operations to quite expensive
Since the % of online sales doubled for Woolworths and continuing to grow, it supported the idea of adding this service to generate revenue.
How do people shop?
We dived straight into interviews with 9 participants. 7 average shoppers and 2 that are engaged in the supermarket industry. Our goal was to understand the habits and issues shoppers could face and ways they would work around them.
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Pricing/ Sale items are a big influences on what items to purchase
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Waiting in the checkout line was frustrating and stressful
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Fresh produce picked for shoppers were of poor quality
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ALDI's centre aisle is great for spontaneous items and low priced goods
"Special Buys is big business"
"The Special Buys Aisle down the middle of the store is a big driver for the company making up 60% of the business"
Interview from Ben that used to work in ALDI’s head office. The operations that are run at ALDI are kept to the bare minimum. So they wouldn’t provide an extra service if it was going to cost too much. (this is why we decided to cut out the delivery service because logistics etc. is very expensive to start up and keep running)
Trends and Habits
An Affinity Map was the best way to layout the data we collected in our interviews. In this way it really helped us visualise the trends and see the recurring issues among our users to create our two personas.
Reinforcing our findings with Surveys
Total of 9 survey results
Unfortunately the questions that were asked were too narrow, the data collected was not enough to be quantitative. Although the results showed new qualitative data also backing up our findings in our interviews.
We had a few participants mention that the stock at ALDI for the centre is sometimes out stock. (the click n collect service we’re delivering will help solve that issue as they can preview and purchase the goods and not having to in store at the time of release)
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Users spend more than $100 per shop. (definitely helped push us since we want to help our users spend less and get more value for the money)
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Most people shop more than once a week
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Users love to shop at ALDI for low cost goods
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2/3 have never shopped online (made us think about how to improve and take advantage of what ALDI represents)
Personas
We wanted to creat 2 personas to better understand out shoppers. So we made 2 personas of similar but different lifestyles and habits.
"Bargain Hunter"
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Constantly looks for bargains and sales in store
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Shops daily for fresh produce and cooks at home
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Uses Click n Collect services for pre packaged goods
"Time Poor"
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Always busy with work and taking care of family
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Uses online shopping all the time to save time
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Loves sales and bargains but rarely gets time to shop
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Dislikes the long checkout lines
User Journey Map
This was created to show how our personas would behave and feel during their experience when purchasing goods through ALDI.
Timothy "Bargain Hunter"
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spends lots of time looking for sales online and in-store
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loves picking own produce
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looks through all catalogues to not miss any deals
Sarah "Time Poor"
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takes a quick look into this week specials whilst placing online order
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is making sure all items are included in the order
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quickly browses in-store offers when picking up Click n Collect order
Card Sort Results
Top Card Sort Results
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Fresh Produce
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Bakery
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Dairy & Eggs
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Meats & Deli
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Seasonings & Spices
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Health & Beauty
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Drinks & Beverages
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Baby
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Liquor
I carried out a hybrid cart sort so we could identify the main categories to suit the way our users shopped. I visited my local ALDI to see how they grouped their items in-store.
It's important to make all of the most popular categories accessible for our time poor users. Ultimately avoiding confusion for all users using the site.
Click & Collect at ALDI Low Cost
The new Aldi website is for online shoppers who would like to shop safely and efficiently, while maintaining Aldi’s low cost business model.
Unlike Coles and Woolworths,
Aldi will only provide a click and collect online ordering services
so that costs from additional operations are not passed on to customers and prices stay low.
Unlike Coles and Woolworths,
Aldi offers Special Buys that provide a huge range of high quality goods at low prices.
Key Features
The MOSCOW analysis helped us rule out any extra or unecessary functions at this current stage.
It made sure we included the must haves like
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Many payment options for online users
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Preview of catalogues Special Buys/ Super Savers
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Easy to use shopping cart/ checkout procedure
Iterations
A total of 3 iterations were made and tested with 8 users and here are the common issues our issues ran into and how we fixed them.
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Too much repetition of special buys (it was confusing the users so they we not sure of which one to select)
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Double navigation bar was confusing (the main focus of our site was to purchase goods so we removed some of them)
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Search bar was hard to find (there was no border and unoticeable)
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Screen was too wide (columns were added to suit small laptop screen sizes making it more compatible)
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Check out steps was too lengthy (we had to shorten and combine the stages together to avoid confusion)
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Order Summary was too empty (the summary did not include enough info about what items the user is purchasing in the check out stage)
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Not enough time and dates shown (user couldn't choose a further date to choose since it's not shown so I added a "show more dates" in the next interation)
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Notes for your pick up store (was confusing and have to understand so we removed it)
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Change in navigation bars (prioritised the main functions and what the website will be used for
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Less images & unecessary options (removed the unused functions to reduce confusion and make it easier to digest)
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Clear search bar (wrapped a boarder to be noticeable. Best to use if you know what you're after)
Link to Current Prototype
Positive results and much more to do
Our goal was to remake the ALDI website and include an additional service that would benefit their business. Provide a great service for the Timothy and Sarah to use.
Although during our research stage, our survey questions were not targetted at the right users and could have been shaped to be more well rounded. We did not recieve a sufficient amount of responses. In the future, we intend to push the survey out to a wider range demographic of people.
Futher usability tests need to be carried out on the existing prototype. I believe with more refinement and re-iterating, the ALDI Online Shopping platform will succeed if taken into consideration.