ALDI Supermarkets Case Study

Project provided by General Assembly Melbourne for ALDI Supermarkets

Background

ALDI supermarkets are looking into e-commerce but they are waiting for a profitable and accretive model that is feasible and profitable. To validate and justify the need and demand for such a platform, we carefully conducted a research plan. As an outcome, we proposed a clickable website prototype that encourages users to purchase ready made grocery boxes.

Scope and Constraints

This project was completed in two weeks and completely online due to the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Our plan and progress looked something like this:

Meet my team and what my role was:

Kirsten Fraser (Team Lead / Project Manager)

Maria Jose Gallo (Lead Strategist / Product Designer )

Oliver Wallace (Research Lead / Visual Designer)

We were all involved in each others processes, however my main responsibilities included: writing a research plan and championing the ideation, wire-framing, usability testing, and prototyping.

Okay, so what did we fist found out about ALDI?

You’ve probably heard of ALDI, but if you haven’t I’ll give you a quick summary: they’re not your average supermarket, they like doing things differently so they can provide customers the lowest prices in the market. They’re known for never offering single use plastic bags, having simpler store layouts and focusing on the highest margin and most popular products.

So, this raises the question: what are our competitors doing?

Cool, so how can we help ALDI users ?

We decided to focus on conducting a survey and several interviews based on these 5 key points.

From our survey and interviews we discovered some key insights

“They killed the joy of going to the market with Covid”

“Delivery options are important due to Covid and it makes my life easier”

“I find the delivery box super convenient, click and collect is straight forward and no exposure to the pandemic”

How are people shopping for groceries during Covid times?

To help us focus on this question and push us in the right direction, the team developed a key persona from the affinity map research.

Meet Martha, she stood out to us because…

Like many of us, she’s concerned about the well being for her family due to COVID-19. Martha’s trying to find the most efficient grocery delivery service so that she can reduce the time she spends at the super market.

Ideation; what we learned..

The crazy 8’s frenzy helped my team and another team from our cohort to combine crazy and reasonable solutions into features and functionality, I prioritised solutions in my notes by always keeping Martha’s goals in mind.

As a team we decided this were our main key take aways:

Why paper prototyping is important

We stayed in tune with our process by starting with a paper prototype, this process led us to focus on what we needed to communicate and only wireframe the important user flow so that we could do usability testing and iterations more efficiently.

Introducing our Aldilivery service! here’s a live demo:

We found out that we had a few competitors with the box; what made us different is that we could be cheaper due to economies of scale, we can use an effective established delivery partner and we support local farmers.

Our Next Steps…

The two week period in which this project was accomplished limited how many iterations of the prototype we could’ve gone through, so we came up with a list of things we would’ve researched and explore further:

• Learn more about the partnership between ALDI and Delivery partner considering the cost of implementing such service.
• Work on the way our website “feels”, meaning the flow, organisation and functionality.
• Refine our Aldilivery message to encourage customers on the benefits of using a pre-made grocery box.
• Schedule usability testing well ahead of time, it would’ve showed our wire-framing iterations quicker, but it’s all part of our learning journey.

My experience and reflection

I personally gained a lot working with my team in this project. As the lead strategist for this assignment I learned to listen to my team’s varying opinions, while quickly coming to an executive decision by always keeping the group in focus at what was discovered in our research and which steps to follow.