A community-driven grocery experience for Jumbo
Brief debrief
In 2017 Jumbo started bringing its app development in-house. We worked with Jumbo during that move to rethink its grocery app. The goal was to turn a product catalogue into a community: grocery shopping built around shared stories, recipes and people, not just a weekly chore.
Helping Jumbo move in-house
Jumbo’s online presence was limited. Its platform mostly listed products, without the variety of content that helps search rankings and gets people coming back. As Jumbo moved app development in-house, it needed a partner to come up with new ideas and reach more customers. Our UX designers worked inside Jumbo’s own teams, which let us run several design sprints and keep the user at the centre of each one.
Prototyping community mechanics
One of the sprints set out to bring social features into what had always been a shopping app. I ran that sprint myself, drawing on years of building online communities. We added analytics data and live user feedback from Usabilla to the process, which let us iterate quickly. The result was the concept and prototype for “Jumbo Lijstjes”, a feature that connects shoppers through shared interests.
Shared lists, shared recipes
Like a concept car, our first prototype was more ambitious than what shipped. But the core idea made it into the Jumbo app and changed how people shop in it. Users started creating and sharing their own grocery lists, from family recipes like “Oma’s pasta” to collections like “Summer BBQ Essentials”. Tags let people describe their lists and made it easy for others to find them. Daily engagement went up, and the app filled with real content made by Jumbo’s own customers.
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Transcript
I particularly like projects like Jumbo because they just happen around you in the real world. I could use the app, which I did when I was working on Jumbo, and I could ask the delivery guy at my door whether I had done a good job, whether I had made his life a little bit easier. I love that directness.
With Jumbo, we helped them transition when they in-housed their app. It was built by a third party, and now they were going to maintain it themselves. I oversaw a team of UX designers working directly within Jumbo’s sprint teams on their apps. At the same time I also got to do some strategic work: I brought my knowledge of community and social features to the app, and we made concepts that we tested with consumers to see if they would stick.
All in all, a really great experience to work on a product like this.