Supercharging Sainsbury's
SmartShop
The challange
SmartShop participation has plateaued. We need to increase SmartShop adoption, improve monetisation opportunities and deliver on our Customer promise that SmartShop ‘scan, pack & go’ is the easiest and fastest way to shop in-store.
My role(s)
Lead CX & Service Designer
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Improved end-to-end contextual understanding
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Pinpointed CX and business opportunities
Future Vision & Strategy Workshop facilitator
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Co-created clear & concise product vision
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Facilited 5 day sprint that created 40+ opportunities
Customer researcher
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Created experience principles to support design
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Integrated adoption of behavioural change framework
1. Where we are today - Communicating our vision
We created an internal video showcasing our roadmap for transformation in 2025 to allow us to confidently communicate our intent and future experiments. It proved a very emotive and engaging way to bring more attention (and expectation) to SmartShop across the business.
2. But before we got to this vision - we needed to better understand the customer journey.
As we were looking to improve adoption - we recruited 10 customers to try SmartShop for the first time - and walked with them from car park to checkout.
I also conducted an ethnographic CX audit of 5 stores to understand how SmartShop shows up. This work allowed us - the findings I created this heat map to illustrate where our customers needed clear ‘How to use’ information (orange) along their first-time journey.
Below: Some key findings from my CX audit of stores. It became obvious very early on that we needed to create some guiding principles to support clarity and consistency. But implementing them still proves difficult.
Below: Research showed customer did not know the benefits of using SmartShop, or felt it was too challenging to adopt.
Below: Our customer walkarounds allowed me to create this experience heat map. It helps illustrate where our customers needed clear ‘How to use’ functional support (orange) along their first-time journey.
Below: We then worked with marketing to align their 'benefits' of using SmartShop to the 'functional' how to use SmartShop message. This is currently part of & informing the contact strategy.
3. Turning research into Principles & Strategy
Now that we understood the customer journey and associated needs and pains we wanted to utilise our insights - get to the 'So what'.
By synthesising the research we created principles, strategic elements and frameworks that would help inform how SmartShop showed up for our customers - and ensure we designed consistently across multiple touchpoints.
Below: Our behaviour change framework.
SmartShop’s biggest challenge is ‘how do we change the way a customer has shopped for years?’ It remains the number one obstacle to adoption. Using behavioural science techniques, I overlaid Steve Wendel's ‘CREATE’ framework on the SmartShop journey to best represent first-time customer needs and to inform our design moving forward.
Below: SmartShop CX principles wheel. I co-created this by synthesising existing quant and qual research - it provides a single source of truth and is an important influence on our vision and strategy. (I lifted the format from 'Engine' - as they say, no need to reinvent the wheel.)
Our strategy… on a napkin.
To align key stakeholders quickly, I led a rapid MIRO workshop with the product team to help us define a high-level product strategy.
It provided the foundation of our strategy - and also the structure for a one-pager for quick communication.
I always strive for simplicity and understanding - simple concepts, drawings or a low-fi approach always help me achieve this.
Below: Workshop Blueprint and Visual Blueprint: Lastly, to get a business view of SmartShop, I used the 'Practical Service Blueprinting' framework for our Stakeholder Workshop as I find this unlocks more usable insights and context and is much easier to use in workshops! You then simplify this view into a more traditional visual artefact for communication and clarity - whilst still capturing the 'real story' behind the arrows and relationships.
4. ‘Future Vision Workshop’ - 5 day hybrid Design Sprint and rapid testing.
With the research and guideing strategy created, we moved into defining the future customer journey... I worked with the product owner to create and facilitate a 5 day Google-esque Sprint with 10 stakeholders.
Our CX Principles, ‘Napkin’ strategy and rich journey maps fuelled these sessions - and by the end we had created an aspirational bank of 40+ near and future concepts.
Below: In true Google Sprint style - we decided where to focus our efforts first.
Below: By day 5 we had co-created 8 storyboards containing 20 concepts we wanted to run high-level perception testing on. Testing gave us a good steer on experiment opportunities and supported prioritisation when aligned with existing validated customer insights.
Guerilla testing our 'How to use' video in store.
I created this video in-store on a shopping trip with my partner - and the next day went into store to test on an iPad.
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We found that customers appreciated the clear explanation.
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But many still had reservations around accidental theft and accidental scanning of items.
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This helped us inform how our colleagues demo SmartShop in-store.
Below: Testing image led 'How to use...' messaging. I'm a big fan of a 'Show me, don't tell me' as a design principle. So I created these 3 step guides for app & handset. I also wanted to test 'SmartShop' as a verb. Although these have since been iterated - the designs are now implemented in SmartShop marketing emails and proposed in-store signage.
5. Back to today... our most recent product experiment.
The Experiment:
Introducing pay on SmartShop handset functionality within a geofenced checkout area in-store
Key Challenges:
Apart from the feasibility of the tech - customer understanding was front and centre of our design thinking - we wanted to make the experience feel like it had always been there and not another behaviour change curve.
Below: I led on the experience map with the product team and in-store colleagues to ensure we considered the end-to-end complexity. It helped us deliver a truly considered and consistent experience.
Below: Using our visual 'show me, don't tell me' nudges, we deployed animated screen instructions to help inform customers of required actions.
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Outcomes of experiment in trial stores.
24%
Increase in CSAT - ‘Ease of checkout’
11%
Increase in SmartShop participation
9%
Increase in new customers basket size
86%
Customer happy to pay on device
Below: An overview of work I'v been involved with during my time at Saisnbury's.
Key SmartShop Outcomes
+20%
Increase in SmartShop participation (in Supermarkets)
7
Features currently being tested in-store from vision workshop
15%
Increase in CSAT ease of check out
6%
Decrease in colleague SmartShop rescans
+8%
Increase in customer basket size
+30%
Increase in colleague training scoring
Final Summary.
SmartShop is a fascinating product - it blends digital and physical environments like nothing I've ever worked on before. It's championing the way forward to a truly self-serve shopping vision, but still remains difficult to adopt for many.
As we move into the future with geofenced payments, contextual product nudges and item location, we endeavour to find the perfect balance between customer experience and business value.
More examples of work
B&Q Kitchens
What could the future kitchen buying experience look like? We were commissioned by B&Q to conduct rapid research, CX audits, future journeys, validate opportunities and conduct a large opportunity survey to understand the perceived customer and business value
NatWest Covid Hub
When Covid starting closing down businesses in the UK, NatWest looked for ways to help its customers... quickly! I was CX Lead on creation of the Covid Hub and also the financial tools within it.
BNP Paribas
A new Global Head of Digital for the number 1 bank in France commissioned us to look at new ways to streamline and empower employees. As Lead UX on this project my team created an iPad app that would utilise existing client data and drive opportunity and sales
