Embodied Shopping

Overview

The main objective is to understand the needs of contemporary shoppers and channel this knowledge to inform the design of a refined or heightened experience for grocery store patrons that maximize positive and empowering embodied patterns of interaction.

Goals

1. Improve the experience of people with severe allergies as to be more time efficient.
2. Help people with allergies have more confidence in what they are purchasing.

User Group

General iteration led me and my group to our main user group which is shoppers with severe allergies. This group of people can also include parents/guardians who may not have an allergy, but are responsible for dependents who do. We classified severe as any allergic reaction causing life threatening symptoms or any sort of allergy that is rare.

Problem Space

After iterating as a team we came to a conclusion of a problem space that we feel best encompassed the users. Shoppers with severe allergies need a way to shop confidently for themselves and potentially others. Some shoppers experience anxiety while shopping, so we set out to limit concerns and fears that may arise.

Design Rationale

Our design was meant to increase the confidence of shoppers with severe allergies. Upon conducting primary and secondary research, we discovered shoppers with dietary restrictions have a fear of new products. We wanted to create a solution that was easy to use and can be used to double check for the shoppers.

We also looked into solutions that have the same feature such as Amazon Pantry. We found that although they have filters to add to your food, they don’t have allergies as part of the list, especially rare ones. We want to encompass all those with allergies in our product, so this is why ours has a search bar. 

Our solution was made for those with severe allergies as a means to gain confidence and branch out on product usage.

Final Prototype

Individual Contributions

This project was very challenging for me personally. It involved a lot of time management and we had to incorporate observations which we just learned in class. I was able to conduct two observations for my group so we could use the findings as evidence to prove our design rationale. Along with that I participated in my fair share of documentation.