Project Overview:

For this project, I worked on a team with 4 of my peers to redesign supermarket self checkouts for our final project for the Prototyping course at UC San Diego. This project spanned a 6 week time span, with the first 3 weeks being dedicated to conducting user research and the last 3 weeks being dedicated to creating an interactive prototype we were to demo in class.

Problem Statement:

Although self-checkouts are intended to provide customers a more convenient check-out experience by not requiring them to interact with a cashier, they are not without fault or frustration. Our goal for this project was to redesign the self-checkout to provide a quicker and easier shopping experience.

Challenges:

1. Expedite the scanning and paying process at self checkouts
2. Create a shopping experience better tailored to college students and their busy schedules
3. Designing an intuitive and easy to understand self checkout UI

Discovering Issues

Online Secondary Research

Conducted online secondary research to get a better idea of users’ motivations for using self-checkout kiosks, how often they are used in comparison to conventional checkouts, what kind of problems users often face, and the scale of said problems. Below are our key insights from this research:

• 2021 Raydiant survey of 1000 Americans
  • 85% of consumers think that self-checkouts are faster than conventional checkouts
  • 48.7% of consumers say they use self-checkouts “almost all of the time”
  • However, 67% of consumers reported that they have had experienced self-checkout failures during usage
• Consumer Reports
  • Consumers faced confusion and trouble when using self-checkouts, particularly in regard to the checkout’s interface
  • Consumers often had to wait in longer than expected lines to use the self-checkouts
  • Staff members were often unavailable whenever a consumer needed assistance

Field Observations

In order to get a solid understanding of what our how exactly users interacted with self-checkout kiosks, we conducted field observations at UCSD’s on-campus Target as well as some observations at other locations such as a Ralph’s and CVS in La Jolla. The following are our key observations:

• The vast majority of consumers observed paid with card, mostly using the tap payment method (full payment method distribution shown below)