'Grocery-Grazing' Tesco App Customers Get More Respect

Over the past week I have been working with my colleagues to tune the Application Programming Interface (API) service that supports communications from all our apps, now that our TV advertising campaign has brought many new customers to the joy of mobile grocery shopping.

Anecdotal evidence shows that we can support five times the numbers of simultaneous customers using their mobile phones than we could just a few days ago.

It's been a tremendous learning curve to make the communications between the API and our grocery platform as efficient as possible, because customers are behaving differently on their mobile phones than on the web site.

Most customers using our grocery website have sat down to put their full grocery order together. Customers using our mobile phones, however, are 'grocery-grazing'. Throughout the day they are are reminded / inspired to think of a product, pick up their phone, start Tesco Groceries, search for products (or scan them), check the price / offer and, if all good, add to their basket.

We know this because it has changed the 'journey' that our web customers normally make. The main technical consequence is that customers on mobile are constantly authenticating with our servers throughout the day. If you leave the app for more than 10 minutes, it shows 'reconnecting to Tesco' when you start to use it again and re-authenticates (logs in again) with our service.

So I have been working to trim down the steps the API has to go through to login a customer without compromising our security. If encryption and other forms of authentication had to stay (of course!), something else had to give. After much research about the CPU/network/database 'weight' of each login step, we concluded that the API's process to go to a customer's personal details to extract their first name in order for our apps to say, "Welcome (first name)" - with the extra authentication needed to extract it - had to go. This is because it has to take the customer's login details and step through more authentication, network and data hoops to get to their account data. 

In this update, API would use the customer's Title and Surname that had always been available through the cookies provided by our web servers to web browsers.

Tonight, instead of my Tesco Groceries app and iPad Tesco Recipes app saying, "Welcome Nick" it will soon - and rather more respectfully - say,  "Welcome Mr. Lansley".

That API update that will give us five times the throughput that it did before. It's more learning in our new mobile world and one that shows how much more thought I need to put into how the API talks efficiently with our existing grocery platform. 

TV advertising....works!

It's all very easy for us digital internet types to get sniffy about how TV advertising is old hat with its scatter-gun approach to marketing and no direct feedback that it works.

I was in this mood when I chatted with Tesco.com's marketing team on the eve of the first TV commercial for the iPhone Tesco Groceries scanning feature last Thursday.

I have to say that they do tolerate me, do marketing. They just smiled and asked me to wait and see.

The TV commercial has been airing since Thursday and...

...now we're in the top 5 list of most downloaded UK apps on iTunes. Oh, and my colleague Omar took a copy of the various API server logs and drew graphs. The graphs showed load levels where the app had been in communication with our servers. The load level graphs had some big peaks, and the peaks matched with the timings of the TV commercials.

That's right - the 40-second commercial basically gets people to scan the barcodes on products - and, when they watch the commercial, they pick up their iPhones immediately and start doing just that! The peaks appear not just from showing the advert on ITV1 (the UK's most-watched commercial TV channel) but even on less-viewed channels - both free and pay TV - on which our commercial is being shown.

I love the thought of thousands of people sat in their living rooms watching TV, viewing the ad which persuades them to pick up their nearby iPhone immediately and ... well... scan something.

I wonder what other customers might find to scan as they get overwhelmed with barcoding desire at the instruction of the commercial? Since the server logs are deliberately anonymised, it has just struck me that I should find out what products were being scanned. For example, as I look around my living room I can spot several grocery items with barcodes - bars of dark chocolate, a DVD of comedian Dara O'Briain I received for Christmas, and a box of Tesco value tissues. Would watching the commercial just make me the scan them? The evidence from the log peaks suggest that I would!

Make no mistake - the lesson that us sniffy web 2.0 digital types need to learn is this:
After 60 years, TV advertising still works.

Nice review of Tesco Groceries app by BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones

The BBC's Technology Correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, has written a nice blog article on the Tesco Groceries app now we have updated it to include barcode scanning.

It's always good when people I respect are enjoying the fruits of the work coming out of Tesco.com!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/10/mobile_barcodes_and_smarter_sh.html

Windows Phone 7 Design

Ribot and our innovation team at Tesco.com have really done us proud in the design and development of Tesco Groceries for Windows Phone 7.

If you imagine that the phone's screen is a vertical window over a portion of the application, then this is what the full screen would look like (click for larger version):

It's an absolutely clean and fresh design, and you access its various elements by swiping your fingers left and right across the phone.

(Incidentally 'Becky' is our very own Rebecca Pate who has helped project manage this application from the marketing and design perspective. A job well done I think!).

Tesco Groceries app logo on Windows 7 Phone

Great still from a BBC video of the Tesco Groceries logo sitting nicely in a square on a Windows 7 Phone.

See the full video of the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones interviewing Microsoft's Ashley Highfield here. Thanks to Twitter followers for pointing this video out to me!

Ribot have taught us the art of Simple.

It's mid-afternoon on a Saturday, and my copy of Tweetdeck is on the screen displaying my favourite filtered Twitter feeds. As you can imagine I have a column filtering "tesco iphone app" and I have to admit I'm enjoying the very many positive comments coming from 'the real world'.

The team at Ribot are enjoying it too. Given that they designed and built the Tesco Groceries for iPhone app, their enjoyment at watching this very real feedback is even greater than mine (click here and you'll see what I mean).

Ribot haven't finished with us yet, though. Their mobile expertise is affecting our thinking and what it means to actually make the customer's experience better by simplifying it.

It's a similar story for Tesco Finder - now customers can get directly to the set of products they are looking for and ignore the cacophony of presentation surrounding them. Indeed I'm beginning to identify a new demographic of customer who has avoided big Tesco stores (particularly unfamiliar ones) in the past because they think it would take too long to find what they are looking for, so don't even attempt to visit.

Teso Finder simplifies the journey to the product by enabling the customer to only look out for the navigation landmarks to get there (such as aisle number signs) and avoid the rest of the information hubbub. This new demographic of customer is now entering our doors - and together customers are using the app to find products at their chosen store at the rate of up to 5 requests a second according to Tesco Finder's server logs.

Now a confirmation message has come down from the very top of Tesco that we must start work soon to join Tesco Groceries and Tesco Finder together into a single app.

This means that in our work pipeline is your simple guide to Tesco groceries on your smart phone whether in-store, at-home or out-and-about - because, as Ribot have taught us: simpler mean better.