Taking a step back and understanding how much time users spend on grocery shopping, we interviewed four users to learn how they shop in general, what are their trigger points and we tried to ran them through some instant shopping use cases. We did affinity mapping for these user interviews to find some common patterns.

From the interviews we found out that there are three different roles within the household, Chief Cooking Officer, Head of Procurement and Special Interest Members. All the users we interviewed were “head of procurement”, they weren’t responsible for cooking, or choosing what gets made in the house, but they are the primary procurer of grocery items in the house. They take their information from the “Chief cooking officer” (who were their mothers in this case), and also took care of any special interest members (for example a sister wanting a snack).

To create an instant habit people need to enter into a virtuous cycle which looks like below image.
A customer has their first moment of aha, or 10 min instant gratification
This creates the urge to check grofers the next time they want something (which should evolve into a habit/reflex)
Each successful shopping journey (that includes finding what they expected to find, placing the order, getting it in 10 mins) reinforces and strengthens this urge, turning it into a habit. “I want this, Grofers will have it, and I will get it instantly.”

The four experiences that power this cycle are :
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The Assortment Experience (having what a customer wants and expects): Do we offer what customer wants, each time they open the app?
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The App Experience: Do we make it fast and easy for them to find and order the items they want?
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The In-Real-Life (IRL) Experience (that gives the “aha”): Deliver each order in 10 mins and provide instant gratification.
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The Storytelling Experience (basically marketing): Are we reminding and reinforcing the reflex to order from grofers for instant gratification?

Now assuming the IRL experience (10 min delivery, fill rate, no quality issues) is already been taken care of by supply side. Let us also set aside the Storytelling experience for the moment. The two things to focus on is first, the Assortment experience, that is, people find what they are expecting to find each time they open the app. And in parallel, the App experience, how people discover and order this assortment.
Talking about the assortments from instant lense and how can we make categories according to instant delivery.
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This is how the current category hierarchy of Grofers looks like;
we have category, sub-category and sub-sub-category.
There are 19 categories which is a lot, so you can imagine the number for sub-sub-categories. Also the current categories are not that intuitive in terms of what items might be present within them, and also a lot of L2 categories could just be put in filters.

Moving on to the next experience the category defining app experience with instant checkout-able cart.

the two basic principles we are following here are design for speed and design with love, at each step I try to ask myself is this something I would be excited about and love to shop from this app.

The design process we are following for this is:

I started with exploring some of the instant delivery apps and tried to get some inspiration from them, the common things that came out of these apps were - clean UI, good visual hierarchy, easy to understand categories etc.

On our app 50% ATC are done through search, 30% from categories and rest 20% from feeds, implying search is very important use case and also for an instant delivery user search becomes even more prominent. But there are only 60% cart conversions from Search which means we need to start with search. But search alone cannot help the user to create cart faster we need category and products discovery along with personalisation to increase conversion. We are exploring such ideas and plan to do usability tests with them.