Author(s):

Kourouthanassis, Panos; Roussos, George

Title:

Developing Consumer-Friendly Pervasive Retail Systems

Publication:

IEEE Pervasive Computing

Keywords:

adaptive user interfaces; adoption; anthropology; appeal; assistive interface; enjoyment; ethnographic study; field studies; focus groups; impact and side effects; interaction; interviews; iterative design process; low-fidelity prototypes; paper prototyping; participatory design; privacy; qualitative research methods; self-reporting; social sciences; usability; usability testing; user evaluation; user satisfaction; user-centered design; utility; value

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the design, development and evaluation of a ubiquitous retail application in a grocery store called MyGrocer. The system is designed to use past purchases and inventory management inferences to develop a shopping list tailored to each customer. As customers move through the store and add items to their basket, the system provides users with a cumulative total and tips on where to find the next items on the list. Upon check-out, participants are efficiently and seamlessly charged for their purchases, without the time-intensive process of "checking out."

In the design and evaluation, the project team took a qualitative approach. To help refine the conceptual design, the team conducted a series of focus groups to learn more about users' expectations of a pervasive retail system, their ability to understand the system and their motivations for using the system.

During the focus groups, the authors presented concept drawings and explanatory text to introduce the system to participants. Participants were then encouraged to discuss their thoughts, feelings and reactions to the system. The video and audio recordings were subsequently transcribed. Overall, participants were favorable to the system, but voiced concerns over the shopping list creation because they felt this was an invasion of privacy (as they understood that this feature required their past purchases to be tracked and monitored).

Based on this feedback, the project team modified the design and conducted a contextual user evaluation. The evaluation included 60 participants from the user population in two grocery stores in Greece and Finland . During the trial, two aisles in the store were stocked with 100 items equipped with transponders. As part of the trial, participants were introduced to the system, completed a background questionnaire, independently used the system to select items in the two aisles, and completed a satisfaction questionnaire at the conclusion of the trial.

Based on the feedback from this evaluation, the team is improving the design. However, several technical challenges, such as the lack of standardized classification schemes for product bar codes and SKU's, will prevent full implementation in the near future.

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