Business Context
Gordon Food Service (GFS) is the largest family-owned and operated B2B food distribution company in North America. Founded in 1897, they currently operate across 50% of the United States and most of Canada. GFS works with independent restaurants operators, healthcare and education institutions, all the way up to major restaurant chains and many more.
GFS offers a few different service options. Customers with high volume ordering needs can receive truck delivery from a distribution center, and additionally drop ship delivery for more "speciality items." These are known as Distribution customers. Customers with smaller volume needs can order online for In-Store Pickup or visit one of the GFS Stores to shop in person. These are known as Wholesale or Store customers. This is a separate line of business from the distribution side.
Short on time? Read this:
This is an internal consulting project I led for the wholesale (Stores) side of Gordon Food Service, which had never worked with a UX practitioner at that time. My high level objective was to quickly get up to speed on their ROPUS (Reserve Online Pick Up in Store) initiative, identify the competitive landscape, and discover their target customers’ in-store and online food purchasing preferences. I served on this project as both product designer and researcher, and this would allow within a 6 week timeframe to deliver research learnings, UX architecture and recommendations, and an outline for their web experience UI design.
Background and Goals
Working on a tight timeline with the wholesale side of a food distribution business, I needed insights to help me rapidly determine an approach for a revamp of the web eCommerce experience.
Key goals were:
Generative Research:
- Understand the competitive landscape around direct and indirect grocery segments.
- Understand the customer journey and in-store grocery landscape.
Design Research Goals:
- Understand customer preferences around product details when shopping.
- Audit the existing experience to help with additional insight needs.
This slide was part of a deck I created outlining the dual design and development cadence for the Marketing Technology team I worked with.
Methodology
Keep in mind. I had a six week window, so it was important for me to prioritize my time. When it came to research, I approached this in a few different ways. For the GFS website, I did a usability audit and leveraged existing knowledge about our wholesale customers. To learn more about their needs for a product detail page, I conducted guerilla research by going to a GFS store and speaking with customers as they shopped.
Competitive analysis was conducted for the product detail page focus, evaluating both direct and indirect markets.
Customers prioritized:
- Allergen info (3)
- Nutrition info, health conscious info, ingredients (3)
- Price (2)
- Serving size, Expiration, Good Images, Size Specs, Brand, Better Product Descriptions
Post-Research Outcomes
Strategic Impact:
- There’s a saying that, “just because someone makes it, doesn’t mean you should buy it.” Sometimes that applies to a digital initiative as well. In the end, the stakeholders for this project were heavily receptive to all the work completed; an unforeseen result though, was that my conceptual work revealed technology gaps, data limitations, and infrastructure issues. Generally speaking, this prevented the team from developing most of what I had pitched aside from the registration and login experiences. Unfortunately, yes. But also, it was a privilege to be able to support a team from a UX/product standpoint that normally would not have had access to our expertise.
Personal Takeaways:
- Looking back, it's possible that with more time I would have conducted a more in-depth technology audit to understand their tech stack limitations sooner.
- I also encountered some internal tensions unknowingly that slowed down progress.
- Although, I did my best to educate the group I was working with, it was quite hard to get them out of their existing mindset about digital product development in a 6 week timeframe.
My Role
I served on this project as the lead (and sole) Product Designer and Researcher for the gfsstore.com web product.
For this, I completed the following:
- Conducted guerilla research
- Performed a competitive analysis
- Created user mapping
- Designed new and/or updated conceptual UI experiences
- Facilitated stakeholder alignment sessions and routine design reviews
