Pay'N'Go

UX Research

Discovery

Summary

'Pay'N'Go was a concept to remove the need to queue when shopping instore. It aimed to achieve this by allowing customers to pay for their items with an app, removing the need to queue for checkout.

Outcome

Ultimately the project was discontinued as it became apparent the need previously identified was not valid in the current market

Process

Initial research & assumptions

Desktop research was first conducted into the current payments landscape and instore queueing. This provided context to the rest of the project and allowed me to begin challenging some of our assumptions.

Our primary assumptions were:

  • Retail shoppers find queueing tedious and frustrating

  • Queueing is a regular occurrence while shopping instore

  • Shoppers will be willing to download an app to avoid a queue

To understand the place of this solution in a typical instore purchasing experience, we created a high-level customer journey.

High level journey of the Pay'N'Go concept

Talking to customers

To understand how consumers purchase goods and the potential acceptance of an in-store payment app, I conducted a series of contextual inquiries at Myer on Bourke Street. Contextual inquiries were chosen as it enabled us to observe behaviours which were not apparent to the participant and also understand what kind of human interactions they had while shopping. This also provided us with more targeted questions during the debrief part of the session.

We were with the customers for approximately 1 hour, split up into 15 minutes of questions, 30 minutes of shopping observation, and 15 minutes to debrief. This provided me with background about current shopping behaviors and habits which enabled me to contextualise the observation part of the session.

The bulk of the time was dedicated to observing the participants' shopping behaviors with a view to understanding how this concept may fit in with their journey. Each participant came with an idea of what they wanted to purchase and were given a Myer gift card to use.

Outcomes from interviews

Based on these interviews, we were able to revisit our assumptions:

  • Retail shoppers find queueing tedious and frustrating | VALIDATED

  • Queueing is a regular occurrence while shopping instore | INVALIDATED

    • All participants struggled to remember the last time they had to queue in a store. Most mentioned specific events such as boxing day as being the only memorable time they had to queue.

  • Shoppers will be willing to download an app to avoid having to queue | INVALIDATED

    • Participants said they would only download an app if the lines were excessively long

    • They all expected to use this app very infrequently and ultimately forget about it

Final recommendation

Due to two of the core assumptions being invalidated, I recommended that the concept should not be pursued in its current form. Further research was proposed to understand the potential applications of this technology outside the context investigated.