ICA: Grocery shopping meets digital customer behaviours

As Sweden’s largest grocery retailer, just how important is UX design within ICA?

Extremely important, because ICA is a customer-focused company. Everything we do is designed to make life a little easier; it also applies to the experience in our digital channels, whether it’s about recipes and meal planning, e-commerce or the in-store experience. Our digital presence has gone from focusing on food inspiration and marketing campaigns to offering everything from scan & go to mobile payment and e-commerce.

Through digital services, we can improve and broaden our offerings to the customer. In developing these services, which directly connect to our business, UX plays a central role and influences the entire development from idea to finished product.

Could you share a brief overview of your UX process? What methods do you use within the field of user research?

ICA has always been an entrepreneurial company, and it shows in the development of our digital services. Although we conduct early user studies and we do our fair share of market research, we know that it’s also important to roll out quickly to customers and test new features and services on “real” users. That’s why we often let ideas move through the development phase quickly; to test new products in the customer’s real situation.

This way, we get quick, real feedback on what works and what needs improvement. After new launches, the analysis becomes even more important in order to improve each function and service.

Your app for watching all ICA’s ads is extremely popular, and your website is one of Sweden’s most popular recipe databases. What’s been the key to your success in digital channels?

In one sense, you can say that we’ve been lucky enough to have created long lasting content over a long period of time. This success has been a central aspect of our digital marketing channels as well, and we’ll continue to develop relevant content about food and health. And of course, in order for our customers to find our content, SEO has been an obvious cornerstone of our development as search engines become like a second or even first homepage.

What would you say are the major challenges, in terms of user experience, that the industry will face over the next 5-10 years?

The transformation from multichannel experience to a true omni-channel experience will be a great challenge. We need to adapt services and content based on device, channel, time and situation. The experience we present in our physical stores also needs to be adapted to the customer’s behaviour in digital channels and vice versa.