{"body":"

How we create user experiences that shape the way the planet shops.

For 20 years, Ocado.com has been at the front line of online grocery shopping. In recent years, Ocado started to look outside of the country to become the technology provider of choice for leading grocery retailers throughout the world.

This created a new challenge for the ecommerce UX (user experience) team: how do we transition from local to international? How do we keep our solutions accessible for millions of users?

Shopping patterns

So how does the world shop?

Well, luckily for us, it does it in a pretty homogeneous way: people look for products they want, add them to their basket, pay for them in some way and job done. This is rooted in our culture as far back as civilization goes. What differs from country to country is, of course, the range of products available and the value we attach to them - a melon will never be as expensive as a luxurious car in Europe, unless you happen to be in Japan.

In ecommerce, we rely on these global shopping patterns but inherit the same cultural nuances. Payment is a friction factor for instance, as paying before even touching the product requires a certain level of trust between the shopper and numerous actors (store, payment provider, delivery services…). For this reason, online payments are regarded as riskier in countries with a high rate of corruption and scams - there, cash remains king. In other countries, the opposite is true - the Nordic countries are an increasingly cashless society, for example. Ecommerce designers respond to these challenges by focusing on reducing the amount of friction in the shopping experience.

But what happens when this experience collides with another fundamental human experience: feeding ourselves and our families?

In online groceries, we face three additional challenges:

Basket size. When buying clothes, you’ll basically add 1 to 10 items to your order. When buying books, perhaps 1 to 3. When buying groceries, we’re talking 50+ items on average. This means a longer time shopping and multiple searches to find everything.

This is an important focal point for us: we help the shopper get everything they need, quicker. The thing is, they don’t only shop for 50 items once. They do it every week. In fact, trends show that basket size is getting ever bigger. Which brings me to my second point:

Basket frequency. Food gets stored, prepared, cooked, enjoyed, shared and even photographed, but the bottom line is that food gets eaten. And then we need more food. So shoppers come back, a week later - and increasingly daily - to shop again.

This is why we allow users to shop from their past orders easily. Which brings me to my third point:

Basket repetition. What do you mean “repetition”? Me? A creature of habit? Well, there’s nothing like data to reveal our true behaviour, and around 80% of products shoppers buy are repeat purchases. If you are looking for milk, chances are that you know which one you like, so whether this is the full-fat organic cow milk you grew up on or that hazelnut & oat milk you love, you’ll buy it again… and again.

We make it easy to find these repeating products by displaying them first in search results. We also have dedicated sections to find these products quickly, like Favourites. We also work on algorithms that can read shopping history to suggest items you have run out of and even propose something new and interesting to the shopper, ‘cause, after all, we all like a little adventure, even if it’s just a new dessert.

We also never clear the user’s basket. So if you add some basil on Monday when you used the last leaves for your pesto pasta, you’ll still find them in your basket on Thursday when it’s time to checkout, acting a bit like a digital shopping list.

These three online grocery specificities become even more important to keep in mind in a world where shoppers do not only eat, but also work, travel around, raise children, take classes and workshops to learn how to restore wooden furniture - true story.

So it’s our job to make our grocery shopping experience fit with their life and not the other way around.

But how?

Consistent experiences

Because we want to help shoppers do their shop in a seamless way, we give them the option to do it via multi-channels for every moment in life: on their phones while commuting, on their laptop while working (yes, we know), and even while cooking by just asking Alexa to add whatever ingredient they just ran out of to their basket.

This means that we strive for consistency in the user experience across our channels. Half of the users of our mobile apps are also using the website for instance. Therefore we want to make sure that they can transition from one to the next without having to learn where things are or where to find them. To do this, our robust Design System helps us re-use patterns and have a seamless journey between interfaces.

The fact that our retail partners have physical stores is also bringing more research possibilities. Ocado.com solely focuses online, but most grocery retailers started with bricks & mortar stores before moving to ecommerce. This presented us with a new opportunity to reconsider some of our approaches, as the goal might not be to shop 100% online anymore, but shop 100% with the same retailer, online or in-store. Integrating with our retailer’s loyalty scheme is one of the first steps taken, but a lot more is on the horizon to blend the division between real and digital.

A seamless experience is often the holy-grail for designers, but even the smoothest flow can become unusable to some users or inaccessible to people with disabilities, and this is where testing becomes key.

Global vs Local

Even though our solution is adaptable to any marketplace, it is really important to be mindful of regional differences. Remember that ecommerce inherits the nuances of the local culture. For instance, in the UK, postcodes are everything. They are very handy to select a delivery address as only a handful of addresses share the same one. In continental Europe, a postcode might be for an entire town, and some countries don’t use postcodes all together. So our UK solution became a challenge in Spain. To move forward, we organised User Testing sessions, both internal - with our colleagues from the Barcelona office - and external - with customers of Bonpreu Esclat, our retail partner in Catalunya. Testing helped us to find a solution that would work well for the Spanish market, but also allowed us to learn things that will benefit all our users.

We also had the recent challenge to design the checkout experience for North America. We don’t have net prices in Europe, what you see is what you pay. But our transatlantic ‘neighbors’ are used to paying taxes at checkout. So we worked closely with Sobeys, our retail partner in Canada, to find the best approach and tested our solutions remotely with users based in this geography.

It’s a good reminder that research is key to understanding these local nuances and how best to address them.

Finding the balance between a single platform and custom local shoppers’ needs for each retailer is a challenge that we all face at Ocado Technology, but it’s also one that brings the most opportunities to user experience designers and researchers. Creating, testing and releasing our solutions in foreign markets is a really exciting space to be in, and watching more and more shoppers use our products from every continent of the globe is definitely what keeps us inspired and motivated to design user experiences that shape the way the planet shops.

Alexa is a registered trademark of Amazon Technologies, Inc.
Bonpreu Esclat is a registered trademark of Bon Preu group.
Sobeys is a registered trademark of Sobeys Inc.

","presentation":{"classes":"","theme":"theme-default","columns":""}}

How do you design a platform for millions of users?