makethingsbetter

[makethingsbetter]

First Instacart experience

Just got back from a long vacation and no food in the fridge. Also, I have no energy to move outside to grocery shopping in a cold and rainy day. Instacart became my lifesaver for such a day!

First time to use Instacart today, pretty satisfying experience. 

1. Definitely won’t miss the free delivery for first shopping, it prompt me to get started, and I also checked the “free delivery for the first 30 days” when checking out, because I checked that the weather will be like this for a long time, wouldn’t hurt to get Instacart shop for me while sitting at my cozy home.

2. I can choose what to buy in different categories and select different grocery stores, usually the ones that’s closer to me. I’m not so familiar with the differences between grocery store but I’m definitely price sensitive, so I wish it could compare the differences for me. 

3. I think the “instant decision-making” is the key of the experience. It’s  important to me today because of such a rainy weather, I wanted to get it deliver to me as soon as possible within “available within x hours”, I want the x to be small, so I need to quickly make a decision on what to buy. The overall design of the site doesn’t make this process “instant” enough: 1. has too many distractions, promos, coupons; 2. take up too much vertical space to display information, need to scroll back and forth a lot to view items; 3. doesn’t group similar products: there are sometimes “regular broccoli bunch”, “organic broccoli” etc. on the list but in different places, most of the time I select one item and found out there are less expensive ones when I scroll down, and I need to scroll back to uncheck the other one, which is a little bit hard to find because they are very similar.

It might worth doing some user research on shopping behavior and major use cases to see different pattern and design for different shopping behaviors. Some people might not shop the way I shop, would be interesting to see how people shop, what’s their expectation, how long do they usually spend, what do they care/don’t care and what information do they miss, etc.

Oh, it would be cool if it’s demand sensitive, like “the weather is brutal outside, here are some quick things to grab!”, so that people feel like “oh it’s smart and related to me” and can urge more pre-packaged purchase, which is easier to shop as well.

4. 

I was slightly confused about “Available within 1 hour”, “available within 2 hours” at the top-right corner and the actual delivery time when you check out - you can only select from the list “deliver around 6pm-7pm”, which doesn’t match with the “available within 1 hour”. 

I think it could be more clear, like “Get free delivery within an hour” or it would be cool if it’s a countdown clock so that telling you the earliest delivery time and also urge you to buy as soon as possible. However, it might not be that important when you are at your office and not so time sensitive, but if you want to get it deliver at rush hour, like after work hour, you still want to make quick decision with a smooth process.

5. Really like to see the instant “in transit” delivery update on the map, especially when you’re super hungry and ready to cook at any time. Seeing the delivery movement real time decrease your anxiety indeed and it’s definitely a “wow” moment for me. For a rainy day like this, I would definitely pay some extra money for a service like this. 

6. The status and order detail page has too many banners at the top. The banners compete with each other and it makes important information less prominent to read at a glance, also push lots of content further down, for example, the order totals. I think the order total number could be moved above the order info, and the status update banners, like “delivered” “information changed” could be somewhat combined. 

The “order in progress” bar was always at the bottom-left corner, it’s a bit blocking the actions. I think a light-weight notification like this is more commonly seen at the bottom-right corner, since people read from left to right, and it’s the least distracting corner. Also, it even shows up when I’m viewing the progress, which you would expect it disappear as a notification. It would be nice if provide more valuable and specific information on this notification, like showing the actual progress “your order is 3 minutes away!”, maybe when you hover on the status, it will show you a mini-map (like the above one), so that you don’t need to take an extra step to another page to view the status.

6. The receipt page seems a little bit overlap with the order detail list page. I would imagine receipt is simpler. All the adjustment should be showing me intuitively in the status page. Also, the design take up too much unnecessary space. Not sure the arrow and the opacity of images are clear to me it means replacements, and it’s too subtle to notice what has changed - name? weight? That’s the thing should be highlighted.

Overall it’s an interesting supply and demand problem and the first time experience is not too bad.