ASHA
AI shopping assistant for B&Q
Skills I used
UX Design
User Research
The User Story
This is Grzegorz, he works as a pharmacist and English is not his first language. Today he's off to B&Q to buy an angle ridge tile (you know what that is...right :)) for his roof. As he's not familiar with the English word for this specific product, he quickly looks it up at the store and gets a crappy literal translation.
Tough luck, the staff member understands this translation as a completely different product, to which he leads Grzegorz. Therefore, he needs to wander through the whole store again until he finally finds what he's looking for.
Next time, Grzegorz promises himself that he will come with his son, whose English is much better than his.
The FIield Trip
Context: In the Greater London Area, 8/19 B&Qs are located where more than 5% of the local area cannot speak English (at all or well)
Insights from field study:
1. Poor accessibility for Non-English Speakers (NES) has led to lots of child brokering.
​
CHILD BROKERING: children translating, interpreting, or mediating communication between their parents and the outside world
​
2. Lack of accessibility is exhacerbated by the size of, and frequent changes to store layout (high-level and low-level)
​
3. Customer support capabilities are wasted due to constant stocking of shelves
​​
​
​​​​​
As stores don't have capabilities for automation of stocking, and constant layout updates are inevitable, non-English speakers could use a shopping helper device as a first point of contact.
Ultra wideband technology for indoor location tracking and guiding to product
LLM translating description/foreign word and matching it to B&Q product
Option to scan the product and collect, or call staff, queuing system on busy days
Handheld, or fit in trolley
With ASHA, Grzegorz pronounces 'angle ridge tile' in Polish and is led to it by the device. He scans the product and receives at the till.
