Upgrading Peppertap’s grocery shopping experience

PepperTap is a hyperlocal grocery delivery service which started in November 2014 with a goal to provide it’s users a quick and seamless grocery buying experience, I was assigned the task of redesigning the existing flagship app with a clear goal to further simplify the grocery buying experience by empowering our users with a no frills distraction free interface and a super simple checkout process.

Simplifying categories

First and perhaps the most important step in the process of the redesign had to be this, old app followed a 3 step navigation structure from the home screen which made users take three decisions before reaching the actual product list, we had to think of a way to reduce this cognitive load to the bare minimum.

We did an analysis on existing categories based on their share in orders in a period of little over a month, from the stats it was clear a category restructure was needed along with the information architecture cleanup, turned out some sub-categories were leading the pack in terms of the order shares, e.g. Fruits & Veggies at 37% of the order share warranted it’s promotion to the top level.

Above is the gist of the final notes that contains the restructured categories that we decided to go ahead with in the new app, the category count had now reduced to 9 with an average of 5 sub categories each, also the categories were 2 levels deep now instead of the previous 3 thus effectively reducing the choices the users had to make to reach the products.

Keeping it simple

Now that we had a simpler category structure I worked on the home screen to come up with a simple tile based layout that would greet the users with a choice of top level categories.

Base color was changed to red because it is a popular color for industries that deal with food items, several red foods, such as red peppers or red wine are known to help increase metabolism. This is one of the reasons that make it stand as a better choice, also it is the PepperTap logo’s base color.

Clear Checkout Flow

Since getting a customer through the checkout phase is the most crucial part of the experience, I set out to create a straightforward checkout flow free of unnecessary distractions, in the limited screen real estate and the fact that users have even lesser patience on mobile due to the sub-par browsing experience in comparison to the desktop warrants a special need for attention to details to keep them engaged and confident enough to go through the process.

For the delivery times and payment modes I designed an experience wherein these choices are already made for the users based on the metrics that we had, a greater percentage of the orders was “cash on delivery” while time slot was an easy choice, i.e. the earliest one in almost all of the cases, due to these little metrics driven touches the checkout process essentially became a breeze for a large number of users, the thinking was also to retain a user’s choice in the next order should they change the payment mode in the current one.

The Result

We performed a lot of in house user testing on prototypes that enabled us to identify a lot of the UX issues that we couldn’t have thought of otherwise, the result of this entire project was a very intuitive app that resulted in an increase in user engagement and helped boost the per day order numbers.