iMarket

Client

King Saud University & Panda Hyper Market (Graduation Project Jan 2009 - Aug 2009)

Role

UX design - Research - Documentation - System Analysis - Coding - Motion Graphic - Marketing

Challenge

Shopping in supermarkets is a tradition and people tend to be conservative when it comes to changing their habits. However, products are increasing, consequently supermarkets are getting bigger. This makes the shopping activity more tedious and effort consuming. How do we apply new technologies on supermarkets, while maintaining the enjoyment and the culture of this experience.

Solution

We proposed iMarket which is a mobile-based intelligent shopping assistant, that improves customers shopping experience in supermarkets through the use of their mobile phones.

Why iMarket?

For Shoppers

Products Information
Monitoring budget (alert, alternatives)
grocery list (organizer and alert, send )
Products recipes. (share, interact)
Prepayment .
Personalized recommendations and promotions according to a customer’s demographic features and purchase history.
Reduce transaction cost and search cost

For Grocery Stores

increase sales
create new shopping incentives and target marketing.
Reducing supermarket's expenses by limiting the number of human resources (cashiers)

For the Environment

iMarket is green !
Reducing the use of paper-based flyers, promotions and receipts

Process

Problem Definition

After interviewing a sample of 30 randomly selected shoppers, a number of the problems related to shopping has been addressed, which are:

The difficulty to balance the budget in hand with the contents of the shopping cart.
The high cognitive cost in searching and finding the desired and suitable products.
The wasted time and efforts while waiting in the long checkout queues.
Difference between the product's information displayed and those stored in system.
The troublesome when it comes to forgetting items in the grocery list.
Wasting money on using receipts, promotion posters and stickers.
High expenses related to human resources required for operating the supermarket.
Supermarkets are full of promotions on different products, and this could be distracting and irritating for some customers when they don’t match their needs.
Customers discover that the product has almost expired after buying it.
Customers spend a lot of time in their shopping trip because of their unorganized shopping route.

Background Research

We researched the market for products that are similar to our idea. This is step overlaps with the requirements specification step. I was responsible for performing the market research, during this step I got a better idea of what is feasible and what would make our product different from other existing projects. This helped me elicit the requirement for our system and discuss them with my team in our brainstorming session. We compared our idea to other existing projects and explained the process of the comparative analysis here

Design

Users

There are 3 types of users in iMarket with different authorizations and interfaces which is shown in the following diagrams. I was responsible for illustrating and specifying the functions to the developer.

Click on image to enlarge

Data Flow Diagrams

After that I consolidated the communication flow between the different components in the system as illustrated in the following data flow diagrams.

Input Process Output IPO

I was also responsible for designing some of the Input Process Output IPO charts,
to show the most important interactions in our system (inputs, its outputs, and the processing steps required to transform the inputs into the outputs).

Interface

iMarket has three types of users : Visitors, Customers and Administrator. All types of users can access the system through mobile or their own personal computers. As for Customers and Visitors, they share the same interface ,except that some features are not functional for visitors.

Click on image to enlarge.