This week we did field research, mainly include user researches and driver researches.
We narrow the scope to delivery of grocery types, like Tesco and Sainsbury, because
most of the groceries are necessities in our life which are bought with fixed frequency and brands.
Firstly I did a questionnaire and gave out. I got 53 results containing different ages from 20 to 40. Above is a summary and we found is not that useful, so we didn't use it.
Then we three separate to do user interviews.
Transcript of user interviews
First we try to understand general reasons for users shopping online.
Then we got some main reasons:
1. Users try to save time, so they want to buy a lot of things in one time. But in this condition, goods are too heavy to carry, though the supermarket is nearby. Users feel inconvenient. Therefore, they choose shopping online regularly.
2. Some users who shop online with low frequency, usually buy some groceries with low consumptions or buy something with sudden wills.
There are also more details from users' experience.
There are also some problems we found that
1. sometimes users need to buy extra things to reach the minimum deliver price. They may not reject buying with others but they feel trouble about this. This can cause more deliver times.
2. Though consumers can choose time window when placing the order, this still limit their time that day.
Users tend to buy heavy, large things or things with long shelf life online, while they tend to select fresh tings and daily food offline.
The observation of what a user buy online
We can see most of them are big packages and almost no fresh food. This observation can give us a Intuitive and specific impression for what they buy online.
I also went to the Tesco metro to observe consumers' shopping behaviors offline.
We can see most of them buy fresh food, like vegetables and fruits, as well as some daily products. Actually, it's easy to be heavy to carry, especially inconvenient for those who not live nearby.
Then we can understand why users shop online.
Then I and Dark searched for the warehouses of Tesco near London and chose the nearest one to do the research.
We want to find how delivery systems works and how drivers deliver goods.
We interviewed 3 drivers there, and they drew an abstract delivery route and explain many information to us in the interview.
London is divided into 5 areas by the Tesco system. Each driver has 2 trips in a day and each trip costs about 4 hours from departure and back to the distribution centre. In one trip, there are 50 ~100 drivers in the work. The number of drivers in each area depends on the density of the orders.
This video explain roughly how the delivery routes are arranged by the system. The arrangement is based on the time slot of each customer. In the same area, drivers’ routes go into different cycles from different direction according to the time slot. They don’t wait in a community and just keep moving. They almost don’t have repeated routes between communities. This is a little different with what we thought at first.
The detailed delivery route inside a community is also the same. So, there can be many drivers pass the same community at different time period in the same trip.
Drivers feel that there’s no big problem about this route.
We also got much information about customers’ behavior from drivers. The load of deliveries to the central London is abut 200~300 kilograms. And people can have up to 2~3 orders a week. Compared with customers live in suburban district, they have about 1~2 orders a month and the load of delivery in a van can have 750 kg in average. The reasons are, They tend to have more family to share and has big houses to store goods. This can be more eco friendly because they don’t need to go out by car. But for those who live in the central, because the cheaper price online than stores in the center and fast delivery, and they have no space to store goods, they have higher frequency to order.
The problem is, when the trip goes into the center, it has lower efficiency of van usage and more times of delivery.
As Jack said in the interview, he thinks the biggest problem about the environment caused by home delivery, is that, when the delivery saver occurred, cheaper and faster deliveries cause more orders in the central of London.
In conclusion, through this drivers' interview, we can get a macro view of home delivery systems and its connection with user behaviors.
Based on all above researches, we have a preliminary design concept of shopping online together with neighbors or roommates to reduce time windows and delivery times;
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