NEXT GEN GROCERY

Circa 2018

Background: With over 40 million users worldwide, Any.do is one of the top productivity tools in the world. I lead the design there between 2016 and 2019.

A better grocery list experience was something Any.do's loyal customers requested a lot over the years, and we decided to tackle it in the middle of 2018. It was a brand new project and an interesting challenge.

WHAT DID WE TRY TO SOLVE?

THE CHALLANGE

Craft the best solution to add and organize grocery items on the app.

Craft the best solution view your grocery list while shopping.

A good grocery experience will increase retention in the long term.

MY ROLE

End to end design: research, wire-framing, design, prototyping, and usability. Yep, all of it.

Platform: iOS & Android

TL;DR

Significant increase in retention on week 1-2 among new users.

73% engagement increase in adding grocery items among existing users.

77% of iOS users & 81% of Android users who completed onboarding, used the feature at least 3 times.

We had good data regarding how people do their grocery on the app, but the best way was to talk with them. There was a lot of pain points attached to 2 core experiences.

Preparing a grocery list:

And shopping at the store:

What did the data tell? Being one of the world’s most popular to-do list apps, Any.do had access to a lot of grocery data. More than 2/3 of our user base just threw their groceries in the All Tasks view alongside their regular to-do’s. The rest did keep a separated list for groceries, some even with multiple lists per chain (Costco, Whole Foods, etc’).

We had access to what grocery items users add from all over the world, and could easily suggest popular items in specific geographies.

We were hoping to help the unorganized users with a better grocery list experience, and provide the already organized an improvement for adding items and help them as they shop in the actual store.

Feedback from V1 of Any.do Moment was fairly positive. It was a fresh attempt to address a known problem, baked within the Any.do minimalistic design language.

But there were problems we found in our research leading to V2, these were the main ones:

1. Data showed customers interacted with Moment a few times a month. The main goal of this next iteration was to increase engagement to a level of a few times per week.

2. Customers had no idea what they have scheduled in their day when they postpone tasks for later.

3. Customers had to make a decision regarding all of their tasks, they couldn’t just skip a task they were not interested in tackling .

4. Customers who used the app to jot up just about anything saw they needed to make decisions regarding tomatoes and onions in their shopping list.

5. The interface didn’t support more than 30 tasks & was designed for 4-inch screens. It didn’t utilize the big canvas larger phones offer today.

6. With all the fireworks & animations, the interface was pretty slow, and you needed a good 3–4 seconds until you can actually interact with the product.

I started at the end. How would the perfect grocery list appear when our customers will be at their local store? One of the first things we aimed to solve and place inside the product was the categorization by aisles.

We wanted to create a strong impression that this is better than anything else our user experienced and analyzed roughly 500,000 items in 10 different languages.

Early research testings showed people understood the main interface and liked the categorization, but when asked about the adding screen, they felt it was a slower experience in comparison to quickly adding a task on the home screen.

We got a far better feedback when using the action sheet module as a grocery list and the quick add bar from the main tasks page, as a method to insert grocery items.

Solving problems to existing users: Getting new users to use the grocery list feature was pretty straightforward. We also needed to address the millions who already used Any.do as their go-to grocery list.

1. Users who had grocery items in their to-do list were promoted to add them to a separate grocery list.
2. Users who had an existing grocery list were prompted to convert it to the new list or be automatically converted if they had more than 80% grocery items in their old list
3. Users with multiple lists were offered to convert each one separately.

We pushed this feature for our iOS client on September 2018 and received great feedback. On December 2018 it was released on Android. The lists are already supported by Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant, meaning users can add items to their grocery list and get it everywhere synced and sorted to aisles. Apple watch support was ready from the get-go, and is in high usage.