Pressure Project 1- Congestion – Min Liu
Posted: January 27, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »In weekends and holidays, there are many people shopping in groceries and congestion often happens in checkout area. For this pressure project, I observed people, environment and technology in the self-checkout area of the Giant Egle grocery store to have better understanding of the traffic happens here, and brainstormed some ideas (benevolent intervention) to solve this issue.
I took some photos in this area. Based on past experience and my observation today, I draw this environment map which shows the flow direction, congestion pattern and their relationship to physical environment.
The journey map helped me organize and visualize custom’s behavior and emotional change during self-checkout process. It also shows some design possibilities to enhance shopping experience.
To avoid congestion and enhance self-checkout experience, we can change the environment layout (IDEA 1) and improve the efficiency of interaction with the self-service machines (IDEA 2). Re-designing a self-service machine is a big project. A lot of things need to be improved including the user interface, packing area, scanning system… More automatic scanning system can avoid troublesome process of finding the barcodes or inserting the item number. (Alec said Kroger had tried similar checkout system in some pilot stores.) Then I suddenly think of why we must wait and checkout in a specific area and why we cannot just pay while we are shopping. And I came up with the third idea -a self-service app, which I thought it’s time and money saving. Alex said that this app can be malevolent if it’s designed to intrigue consumption. It’s true. It’s important to think about possible issues causes by technologies.
