ALDI Online Shopping
Making online grocery shopping easier and faster
Project Story
ALDI is a low cost supermarket that provides for all your grocery needs and excels on their Special Buys™. We wanted to design a Click n Collect service, improve the IA on the existing website to improve sales and market exposure.
Roles
I worked on this project with another designer over 2.5 weeks. I engaged in all steps from research, synthesis, ideation, sketching and prototyping on figma. This project was carried out during an immersive UX course at General Assembly.
Our goals
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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
Since ALDI is a grocery store we wanted to retrofit a Click n Collect and delivery service to their website.
We wanted to redesign the current website and increase ALDI's market value and generate revenue for the business.
The website is hard to use
After running usability tests of the current website many said that the it was hard to navigate through the website. The website lacked services as many said that it served little purpose.
Some also said there were too many categories and it was confusing to tell which tab hold the information they're after.
Difference between the supermarket giants
Statistics and reports show Woolworth and Coles have experienced major growth and the percentage of online sales doubled and was forecasted to increase even more.
Delivery Fee's are costly and there's always minimum spend.
This motivated us to add this service since ALDI is the 3rd largest supermarket chain as we believed that they could capitalize on this side of the market and increase their sales margin.
How do people shop?
Total of 9 participants were interviewed amd surveyed
"ALDI will cut every cost possible"
- Former ALDI Head Office Employee
This was a vital turning point after finding out ALDI runs operations at minimal cost and so the delivery service is non viable as it's too costly to start up. Our attention then turned towards developing only the Click n Collect service.
In other cases, many shoppers found pricing/ sale items to be important as they heavyly influence their decision. Many were also enjoy shopping at ALDI for Special Buys centre aisle.
Long check out lines was also quite stressful and frustating since there's always a long line waiting behind. Shoppers found the fresh produce picked by staff were not the best quality although this was out of our scope.
It all comes down to pricing
Over half of the shoppers would shop more than once a week and spend over $100.
What mattered most to was having a variety of low cost items and saving money. So the overall savings are greater since ALDI is unique for their low price offering.
"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
A journey through the supermarket
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
Categorising grocery products
By carrying 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.
This provides the user with a list of popular categories to avoid confusion when trying to locate items.
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
The Concept
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.
Testing for a better platform
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)
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.