Smart Shopping Service (3S) is a shopping assistant useful for many target audiences that need assistance with shopping. For instance people who don't like grocery shopping need to get in and out of the store as fast as possible. That requires an organized shopping list, a well thought through route and quick check-out. Also people with multiple parties in family need good coordination of necessary items that need to be bought.
Smart Shopping Service is a service that enables multiple users to jointly create a shopping list, share and edit it in real time.When at the store the application functions as a GPS assistant that directs users to the right isle and to the product. It is done according to the shopping list and the list is automatically reordered into the most efficient (and fastest) route for the user. In order to provide a full service the 3S application makes one's phone act like a self-service scanner to scan the bar codes and in the end pay for the goods.
The buyers of the system (our customers) are the supermarkets who obtain the system. They are seen as our actual market to sell the product, then again the market research concerning the specifications and design of the product needs to be conducted on the actual shoppers. Shoppers are seen as users of the system and for them the product will usable free of charge.
There are many products on the market that provide some of the same features than the 3S. Then again the 3S has the majority and the most important ones of them combined together to provide the full service the customers need.
Thank you for the idea! I must say that I am a little bit uncertain about this. Is this really an issue that must be solved? How often do we see people using mobile apps in supermarkets (checking Facebook when standing in the cue is an exception)?
VastaKustutaI have found some possibly related works. Reading these might help you to find good reasons that support your project idea.
Yan Xu, Mirjana Spasojevic, Jiang Gao, and Matthias Jacob. 2008. Designing a vision-based mobile interface for in-store shopping. In Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges (NordiCHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 393-402. DOI=10.1145/1463160.1463203 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463160.1463203
Nguyen, Vinh-Tiep; Le, Trung-Nghia; Bui, Quoc-Minh; Tran, Minh-Triet; and Duong, Anh-Duc, "Smart Shopping Assistant: A Multimedia and Social Media Augmented System with Mobile Devices to Enhance Customers' Experience and Interaction" (2012). PACIS 2012 Proceedings. Paper 95. http://aisel.aisnet.org/pacis2012/95
We don't have access to ACM or AIS in TLU, but I can send you these papers.
We also had one shopping related project idea in this course some years ago - SMART-market.
About the architecture of the system: I understand that there is going to be a mobile app for the clients and a web interface for the shops? Designing both during this course would be too big project, so I would focus on just the mobile client app.
This is a suitable project for the course but you really have to think what motivates people to use a system like this.
Good luck with your project!
As I am the user of similar application called Grocery Lists, then I'll appreciate the innovative features you are trying to create with your app for example GPS assistant. I am avoiding Prisma supermarkets, because I spend too much time on navigating there and looking for things. I really prefer to walk my daily steps with the dog outside and not in supermarket. So I find this feature could be very useful, if it really helps me to get my things as quickly as possible. Although I see a problem that there might not be GPS signal in multi-storey supermarkets.
VastaKustutaCreating and sharing your shopping lists with family members are features that already exist in different applications, but the usage of them can be quicken, if pre-entered goods would be in local language, so they can be chosen without writing all letters. Furthermore adding items to lists could be quicker if user can use bar-code scanner to scan for example an empty cereal box. Current situation is that Grocery Lists do not find the most of items in our shops from its databases. So I really welcome your idea to co-operate with supermarkets, who could give you access to their database of existing products. If the bar-code scanner in my phone would work also as a self-service scanner as we have seen in Selvers' then I would definately use this application.
In general, I consider the idea achivable and there are features not existing today I would use, but maybe that's just me. I don't know any families, who use shopping app, except my family. So market research among estonians should be done before.
The part with having more people for a shopping list is very good. If people can update the list in real time while they are shopping, so they can tick what they already bought, then this would be something useful and it would give a precise goal to tick the whole shopping list, while encouraging team-work.
VastaKustutaThe part with guidance to the right product, I don't see yet how it could work because it would be too much hassle with it:
1. The shops have to update the positions of their products.
2. Will people really use this? I mean, I would if I would get a certainty that it would guide me to the right product, but that's hard to achieve. If you can convince users of this, then yes, that would be great!
3. I think that GPS is not precise enough to give a perfect location, it might give you a location few meters (or more) away from the one you actually want, which might not be good enough.
Finally, I like the idea, but if you want it to really be used, then all the possible issues should be somehow fixed.
Good luck!
Hi, I have quite similar opinion about this idea as Marcel. I think that the amount of time and work shops would have to spend on filling in the database with all the information about products would cost them much more that the application would bring them back. And to be honest I actually doubt that this GPS navigation would be possible from two reasons:
Kustuta1. GPS is not that precise so you could easily end up in grocery department when your app would tell you that you are in the cheese department, GPS signal indoor is very week, it takes some time until your phone connects to the network of satellites to give you your position, so you would not save that much time and as last GPS is the biggest battery power consumer in your smartphone, so one visit to shop could kill some older phones with battery which is not that fit anymore.
2. As I said there is just too much work with all this. One shop can contain thousands of different products and you would have to give a GPS location to every single of them in every single shop. Then you need to create a maps of all the shops to be able to calculate the shortest way. For all this shops would need somebody who "knows to do the stuff", so the cost of running this system would be abnormal and I don't think that it would actually bring big added value, therefore income from this for shops would be in red numbers
3. It seems bit ridiculous to me to walk in the shop staring onto my phone following the shortest way to the shelf. And I think that if you go to some shop regularly, you usually remember where is which product, so you don't need GPS :)
If I was you, I would focus on just a normal application serving as a grocery store list and leave this (although very nicely looking) GPS feature behind, because it is technically achievable.
I agree with Marcel and David. This product does not seem very necessary, it is a bit of an "imaginary pain", that we are all so lost in the monstrous supermarkets, that we need GPS to find something. After all, they are built according to a certain logic, and we can guess where our needed product is. Next thing, if you want supermarkets to pay for this solution.. If I would be a supermarket, that would be the last thing I would want - that the customers find, say, milk FAST. Because then they would not grab and pay for fifteen other things on the way. But the idea Marcel pointed out about a shopping list that can be updated in real time, that seems just genius for me! I do not know, maybe something like that has been done before, but I would definitely use that when shopping with my friends for a party, or with my boyfriend after a long day wanting to spend as little time in the shop as possible, if it would have some competition aspect to it. You have a list - you split at the entrance, and go for the points - who gets more stuff, wins. A nice everyday alternate reality strategy game :)
KustutaAntra
I really like some aspects of your project, such as sharing a shopping list. Quite often while compiling a list at home for somebody else, I tend to forget at least one item, so instead of calling the person and telling them to buy this or that as well, I could just update the shopping list from my phone and the item would be added to the list on their phone.
VastaKustutaI'm a bit more sceptical about the GPS assistance. Instead, I would recommend to have general layouts of the shops (bread and milk isle in different colours or smt) and the app would tell you which items are in which section, because as mentioned by others, shops tend to change the specific locations of items rather often (+ there are the daily/weekly discounts displayed separately). So far, I know that only Säästumarket has a similar layout in all of their shops so it's easy to navigate through them wherever in Estonia you are, but other shops and supermarkets could really benefit from the app.
Good luck!
After reading all the comments I understand that this "shared family shopping list" part of your idea is actually quite useful in real life. Maybe you should focus only on this?
VastaKustutaThere are two differing opinions here, some say the product might not be used. I think this is where you go and do interviews with people who do shopping most often and you do not ask leading questions - you just want to know what problems they have while shopping and if they think a mobile app could solve them (and you develop your personas based on interviews with real people, changing names and asking permissions of course).
VastaKustutaIt might very well be that some of your envisioned features are very much needed. For example we already have one person in this group who uses apps for lists. I think I would be interested in one, too - in some situations :).
http://www.groceryiq.com/ Grocery IQ is worth having a look at as the most used product similar to what you want to achieve. And yes, TALK to the supermarkets first, they might or might not be interested. For example 2 out of 5 decision makers in the supermarkets would say yes, if you also do this, this and this features and don't do this one. Could be an overkill for this course, but a good idea if you are committed to the project anyway.
Also, there are people who value their time more than their money as far as shopping is concerned, so you could potentially sell this app to users themselves.
Good Luck
Arman
In general I really like the idea especially the shared part of the idea but my main question is like with many apps – what is my motivation to download yet another app to my phone= Do I really hate shopping that much or will it make my life considerably easier? Moreover it seemed to me for a second that this app with the GPS and everything will make my life even harder when I think about navigating in the app at the same time when I’m trying to shop something. Estonia is quite small market maybe for that app and I have a feeling that a typical Estonian goes shopping in a local supermarket that he/she knows by heart and therefore find needed things easily. But that is just a guess! I have been personally part of creating an app for Toidutare.ee https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ee.toidutare&hl=en that has been downloaded over 5000 times by now and is very popular at the moment. It combines recipes and grocery list which is a nice thing because many of us have rather a question what to cook for dinner of for some special occasions, so you can choose our favorite recipes and then add needed ingredients to the grocery list. The app still keeps improving while people are using it since some things are not working that well but it’s getting there and it could be a nice example to think about when improving your project. Good luck!
VastaKustutaI believe its a nice idea even though the application with GPS is quite hard to implement .There are some positive aspects of the project too ,I think it will create more competition among the shops selling similar products and the customers will be benefited. through the application they will know where they can get the product in lowest price . So good luck for your project .
VastaKustutaThis is good idea. There are many apps out there that provide the same or similar feature. Personally, I use this app called "Out of Milk". It's a great app and even allows you to scan products by ID and tons of good features. The main issue here is usability. The app is used by me under different contexts:
VastaKustuta1. A scenario when i peacefully sit down and create/plan my shopping lists
2. Retrieving those lists while i am on the go.
Most apps of this kind are designed by keeping the first context in mind. If this app is truly usable on the go, I spot great potential. Another thing about self-checkout systems at super markets. I don't think they are usable at all and people prefer going to a human!