Clever Shopper: Supporting In-Store Decision-Making

Grocery shopping can be a difficult task where the users are overwhelmed by the number of products available. It can be daunting to efficiently locate products and make decisions among dozens of brands to meet personal priorities (e.g, budget or nutritional value). To date, existing interactive systems supporting the grocery shopping experience do not help shoppers make informed decisions based on their priorities or preferences. To address this problem, and based on requirements gathered through contextual observations of shoppers, we have developed Clever Shopper, an on-cart, tablet application prototype that enables shoppers to quickly and visually compare key product features across brands based on their price, volume, and nutritional values. Clever Shopper also supports checking for product availability and directly guides the shopper to efficiently reach the product at its physical location in the store. Evaluation sessions with shoppers revealed important benefits of Clever Shopper and point to further improvements of the concept and prototype.