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Designing with empathy

Whether we’re creating customer-facing products or designing in-house systems for operations, the goal at Picnic is to design solutions with the user at heart.

Our main design challenge is to break a decade-long ritual of going to brick and mortar supermarkets and convince people that online grocery shopping is fun, easy and affordable. Taking up e-commerce’s biggest challenge, we adopt a user-centric approach to create a product that is used daily and competes with long-standing shopping habits.

Picnic’s design culture facilitates this. The iterative building and testing of prototypes are done in a rhythm dictated by weekly user-testing cycles with real customers. Unexpected insights often lead to different perspectives on the initial design scope. And with such frequent user-testing, we can be sure that our products create intuitive value for our customers.

Each testing session is wrapped up by a collective review meeting, during which all stakeholders have a voice: product owners, designers, developers and most importantly; our users. This gives everyone a deep understanding of user values, needs and wishes. Keeping us all in the loop and shortening overall development time from rough ideas to the finished product.

It’s not just the design of our customer products that remains user-centred. While Picnic’s operation is driven by a “just-in-time” model, backed by advanced technology and algorithms, it also remains people’s work. We conduct research to build, test and tailor enterprise software to humans, so whether the user is a delivery driver or an operations manager, complex logistical problems are dealt with as efficiently as possible.

Having the attention on the user throughout the design process makes our work more fulfilling. It cultivates empathy throughout the team which filters down into each detail of the product. From in-house solutions to our customer-facing app, we always design with people in mind.

– Kay Mourik, UX/ UI Designer