INDUSTRY-WIDE STUDY
Reviewing the usability of 6 supermarket apps
- September 12, 2017
We compared the 6 most used Spanish online supermarket apps according to their usability and their customers’ user experience.
Challenge
The purchase of food products online is one of the major battlefields of e-commerce in recent years. The rapid growth of the industry and the entry of new players have accelerated the digitization of online shopping services, leaving ample room for improvement in terms of usability and user experience.
Therefore, we wanted to conduct a study of best practices in this industry comparing the apps of 3 established chains (El Corte Inglés, Carrefour and DIA) and 3 pure-players (Ulabox, Comprea and TuDespensa.com).
Methodology
For the study, we decided to conduct a UX Expert Review. An expert in UX usability and research performs the review.
Thanks to the expert’s extensive experience in research with users and participation in multiple UX consulting and auditing projects, he or she knows the best practices of the industry and is able to detect major usability issues, without the need to test with real users.
Process
For our review, we focused on the key steps and aspects of interacting with the app when first ordered:
- Onboarding
- Browsing and Searching
- Terms of Purchase
- Product Data Sheet
- Checkout
- Extra Features
Results
The arrival of exclusively online supermarkets has been a great challenge for established chains.
In general, we detected that startups have a better command of the interface usability of their apps and provide better-designed and more usable solutions. However, there is still ample room for improvement for the 6 apps analyzed.
During the study, we found usability problems in all the steps we researched (Onboarding, Browsing and Searching, Terms of Purchase, Product Data Sheet, Checkout and Extra Features); some of them, quite serious.
From these problems, we generated a report with all the findings and good practices that should be applied in the supermarket industry. These good practices, such as presenting clear terms of purchase and not using an information architecture that’s too broad or too deep, would help reduce the risk of abandonment during the purchasing process and improve the customer experience.
You can download the report to see in detail the various approaches that the 6 analyzed apps employ, their result at the usability level and our recommendations for improvement.
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