Ordering Ordering

Instacart is an interesting (if overpriced, IMHO) grocery delivery app. I use it because I don’t have a car but still like to eat. If either of those conditions were changed, I’d probably stop getting groceries delivered. In general, it is well designed – I have some problems when an order is being delivered – switching between the map showing the deliverer’s location and the regular interface is a pain. Also, there’s a bit of confusion where I am when I have more than one cart, but other than that, things work well.

But it could be better. One of the areas where the Instacart interface fails is item replacement.

When you shop for yourself, it is an easy matter of finding a replacement item when what you want is not available. You have an idea of what properties are important and what is unimportant in the item; e.g. when you order ice cream, you care that it is Ben and Jerry’s brand more than you care it is Chocolate flavored. However, Instacart does not offer an opportunity to communicate those layers of importance.

Instacart offers a simple replacement option:

As far as I can tell, it is a simple search based on the title of the item you chose. The system reads “Taylor” and “Broccoli” and “Florets” and gives the most relevant answers in relevance order. That’s good as far as it goes, but what if that replacement item is out of stock? What if the replacement item isn’t in the list of possible replacements?

The fall backs, a search in the replacement interface and a chat feature are clunky. They offer single replacement or a long conversation where one party, the app user, is blind. At that point, the process seems to be for shoppers to take a photo of the area where the item was found and ask for direction.

The chat feature is an even more egregious solution. If I wanted to direct a shopper and tell them a complex string of instructions, I would have done that in the first place and Instacart could just be replaced by a long annotated voice recording of my grocery list.

As always in this blog, back to basics – what is the user trying to do.

I, as the user, am trying to buy (for example) 32 ounces of yogurt. I prefer Fage strained (Greek style) 0% milk fat. So I choose, in the app:

“Fage Strained Yogurt, 0% Milkfat, 32oz.”

Back to basics – what, as a shopper, would I do if it wasn’t in stock?

I have priorities in my head, priorities I have never written down, but I can use when I’m at the grocery store, to find a suitable replacement.

In order of importance to me, here is the same product label as above:

• Yogurt
• Strained
• 32oz
• Fage
• 0% Milkfat

It would be fairly simple to present an interface where I, as the orderer, disassemble the product description and then reassemble in order of importance to convey this algorithm to the actual shopper, but that would be a disaster for two reasons – 1, the actual shopper would have to reassemble the words into a product title to find it, a process fraught with error, and 2, some products have ‘poetic’ names, and they have no meaning when it comes to priority. For example: Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream has a flavor called “Lights! Caramel! Action!” You as a developer have to either make the entire flavor a single string in your ordering OR hope that the word “Caramel” isn’t important.

Back to basics – in real life, you show importance by pointing at it.

If you consider a tap as the gesture of pointing, then we can easily record ‘importance’ by adjusting the font weight of a word that is tapped on. (Unfortunately this blog only offers two levels of font-weight (bold, normal) so I’ll simulate the results using italics, and underlining.)

Fage strained yogurt, 0% Milkfat, 32oz.

This isn’t ideal presentation in this blog, but you can easily pick out the prioritization of products based on this simple change. The actual shopper will understand that 32oz of strained yogurt is of high importance while the percent milkfat and brand is lower priority. If I had font weight at my disposal, I could get finer prioritization.