How would you design a supermarket for the elderly?

Understand the situation

This is kind of an ambiguous question. Are we focusing on the redesign of the physical supermarket itself with senior citizens in mind or are we trying to improve the design of the grocery buying experience? Let's focus on the grocery buying experience but in relation to the physical store. We won't consider delivery services for the sake of this exercise.

What is our rational or motivation for this specific design task? Are we trying to increase engagement amongst the elderly or are we trying to increase revenue? Let's focus on just providing a really solid user experience for the elderly.

User Personas

There is a wide variety of independance levels amongst the elderly and that dictates what kind of pain points they have with the supermarket experience. Let's try to define several different groups of users:

1. Physically Impaired: Not all eldery people are able bodied and a lot require either wheel chairs or canes to get around.
2. Hard at hearing: Hearing aids are common amongst the elderly
3. Caretaker: These are the people responsible for ensuring the well being of the individual, whether that means accompanying them in person or just making sure their elderly person is taking care of themself sufficiently. 
4. Near sighted: Don't have the best vision, probably wear glasses. Won't be driving a car.

Out of the above user segments, I am going to suggest we focus on the handicapped user segment. There is a large number of older people with physical ailments that impede their mobility in some capacity and it is really frustrating to not be as mobile as you once were so there is a huge opportunity here to make the experience better for these users.

Pain Points / Needs

1. Can't reach items on high places
2. Lifting heavy items is a non-starter. Ingrid has an orange tabby she loves very much, but there is no way she is lifting that 50lb bag of kitty litter into her cart.
3. Will struggle to push a heavy cart themselves while shopping
4. Motorized scooter baskets aren't large enough for a week's worth of groceries
5. Get tired easily and may need to take a break

Solutions

1. Assistance buttons placed throughout the store, customers could press these to beckon for assistance with high or heavy items. Kind of like a stewardess light on an airplane.
2. Motorized shopping carts, identical to how e-bikes can use motor power to require less manual effort
3. Mechanized shelves that you could press a button and the shelf would extend a robotic arm to gently place your requested item into your cart, or tilt up to slide heavy items from lower shelves onto your cart
4. A claw machine on the outside of the store that you would back up your car to, pop your trunk, and it would place your packaged groceries into your trunk
5. Elderly specific packaging for heavier items. We would take items that elderly people typically have trouble lifting and offer them in smaller sizes with better handles. For example, instead of forcing customers to buy a 30 lb bag of cat littler we could offer the same product in 5 lb portions. If a customer could lift heavy objects but was unable to reach things on the ground due to flexibility issues we could have vertically taller bags with long handles that stand up.

We won't have the resources to build all of the above solutions in parallel so we should pick one to prioritize. In order to help us do that let's create a table comparing the solutions above:

Monetizability, Ease of Implementation, Customer Satisfaction

1. C, A, B

2. C, B, B 

3. C, C, A

4. B, C, A

5. B, A, A

Out of the solutions listed above, I'm going to suggest we prioritize building eldery specific packaging. Our main goal is to provide a really solid user experience to the segment of elderly people who are physically impaired and that option achieves that the best. 

Let me explain, all of the other solutions make it easier to navigate the supermarket experience but at one point or another the customer is still going to require someone else's assistance to finish the task. The elderly specific packaging will enable users to complete the grocery buying experience with as much independance as they had before. None of the other solutions address the problem of getting the heavy items out of the car when home, but elderly specific packaging does.

Summary

In order to increase the user satisfaction of physically impaired elderly people who go to the supermarket, we will offer elderly specific packaging to address the issue of items being to heavy to load or unload. This will provide a really great user experience by restoring the same level independance these shoppers had when they were younger and able bodied.