MapMe is a grocery shopping system integrated with users’ smartphones and shopping carts to help them improve their shopping efficiency and experience.

MapMe can integrate with any grocery store smartphone app, and users could have a great experience creating a list, syncing with the smart shopping cart, following a responsive “Bird’s-Eye View” map and navigation line to find items, displaying real-time coupon and sale information, and finishing shopping quicker and more enjoyably.

Motivation

Most people have probably had shopping trips that looked and felt like this:

Our team of experts and I observed that shoppers are usually crisscrossing grocery stores while shopping. The reason, of course, is because they have difficulty finding every last item or forgetting to pick up items along their way. If shoppers are not familiar with the grocery store, it will take much more time to find items.

A recent Gallup Poll shows that 82% of US adults go grocery shopping in a grocery store at least once a week (Jones, 2019). Through our research and interviews during our design process, we also found that relatively everyone wants to see coupons and sales information while they shop. When all these ideas present, it was an excellent opportunity for us to find a better solution to help improve grocery shopping efficiency.

User Enactments

Before conducting our user enactments, we listed several research questions regarding interface preference, navigation method, substitute suggestions and so on, to focus our research and better design and experiment with user enactments. We also chose five scenarios to simulate for shedding light on potential design opportunities.

Based on the results of user enactments and notes we collected from the follow-up interview, we received six key insights, and we chose the two most important insights list below as our key feature in our later prototype.

• Participants prefer the simplistic birds-eye view of the store with markers for list items, rather than turn-by-turn navigation to each item, and a search bar/item look-up with the phone as an interface.
• Participants were eager to see a coupon system integrated with application list that offers personalized discounts when at the store.

At this point, we had refined our design down to a specific system based on what we learned from our user enactments and previous milestones. We also identified the user’s interaction methods with the system and how it will fit into our audience’s grocery shopping routine. For more details of our user enactments, read our Milestone 3 update.

Experience Prototype and Results

Our prototype is comprised of an interactive Invision prototype to act as the smartphone application, a smart cart with electronics, and physical products and props to simulate a grocery store.

For the user interface screen, we created a mockup to help improve users’ interaction with our product. The basic interaction within are creating a list, syncing with the smart cart, viewing the store floor plan, and coupon notifications. For the smart cart, we put all components in a box on the shopping cart, and the LED light will change to green to indicate a successful connection between the phone and cart. The light is controlled by a Particle photon microcontroller in the box, and we wrote C++ code to turn the light on and off for our demo. Our prototypes cover many aspects of the real shopping experience for users.

After we conducted the demo with these prototypes, our classmates were mostly concerned about privacy, which is a common issue that almost every application faces. How to protect users’ information and gain users’ trust is essential for every product, and is something this design needs to consider closely.

Ideal System Proposal

The final proposed system consists of a sensor network that integrates with existing grocery store smartphone applications. Users pair their phone with a shopping cart by scanning the unique QR code on the cart, which establishes a Bluetooth connection. A network of indoor positioning sensors throughout the store will communicate with the hardware on cart with iBeacon technology. The cart communicates with the users phone via Bluetooth to show their location and where all the items are on their list on a bird’s-eye-view floor plan of the store.

This product would be sold to grocery store chains, Meijer in the example above, rather than exist as a standalone app for users to download. We would work with them to integrate our location-finding technology into their existing smartphone app, implement our sensor networks throughout their stores, and map their floor plans.