Yesterday I watched my friend’s mum who wanted to check some prices for products on the Woolworths/Countdown website.
After helping her with the first barrier to browsing the website (which is having to select your suburb so that accurate prices can be displayed) she was confused about where to go to find products.
There are three main pathways to display products, browsing aisles, searching for items, and using the ‘quick list’.
I found the search process particularly frustrating because before seeing a list of matching products, you have to choose a single ’shelf’ that products are categorised by, which seems to me a completely unnecessary step. Why not just show a unique list of all products that match the search term?
So I sat down and spent some time sketching out a few rough ideas then made the created a concept for a search results page which hints at a few significant changes from the current design…
Download the concept (1 page, PDF, 578 KB) or see some highlights below.
Search focused
Search is promoted as the main method of finding products. Instead of navigating down a hierarchy of departments, aisles, and shelf as the current website requires (or any other categorisation), this concept requires people to use keywords to search for matching products.
Dynamic filtering
This may lead to a wider range of items in the search results and so aisle categorisations can then be used as a way to filter search results.
Current order details not displayed
The current design shows a side bar with the current order. As the size of the order increases only a portion of the current order is shown at any single time. Instead of trying to fit this onto the current page I’ve opted to having a dedicated page for viewing and modifying the contents of the current order.
Cross sell
An experience that the current website fails to capture from shopping in-store is the ability to be exposed to store specials are you’re browsing the aisles. The current website does include some banner advertising to promote specific products but they are limited. Instead this concept suggests cross-sell by dynamically displaying featured products from nearby product families of the current search result. In the sample concept someone has searched for hummus, but a special for aioli is also shown.
Overall this is only a quick concept, but likely misses some key business or technological challenges or objectives that come with supermarket e-commerce, but it was something that I had some fun with this afternoon, I think that a supermarket website would be a fun project to be involved with!
What are your frustrations with supermarket websites? What ideas would you like to see supermarkets implement online?
