An ethnographic user study of the older customers’ supermarket shopping experience in the UK 2015

Data collection consists of (1) four focus group discussions with 4-6 participants in each (22 in total), (2) diary cards, (3) inspection cards and (4) 29 background interviews and 29 first post-shopping interviews. This ethnographic user study aimed to investigate older customers’ supermarket shopping experience, so as to explore issues and challenges they face during a holistic shopping process and make recommendations for retailers to improve their service for this customer segment in the UK.This is an international collaboration research project, which aims to investigate the challenges and difficulties that elderly consumers face during their supermarket shopping process in two different countries. The research will be conducted through focus groups, user studies, questionnaires and design workshops. It will help explore the way in which supermarket service and environment design currently operates and can therefore be improved upon in order to provide a better experience to elderly consumers in the United Kingdom and China. Practically, this project intends to provide empirical evidence and practical design solutions by obtaining first-hand, accurate and comprehensive research data. Strong academic and industrial collaboration will provide a high level of international research with an excellent impact factor. The collaborators include Brunel University, Tsinghua University (China), Centre for Research on Ageing at University of Southampton, and Sainsbury’s.