An Exploration Study of Smart Retail Service Design for Older Customers in the UK

The world population is ageing. Although many assistive technologies have been developed to support older people in their later life, there is a scarcity study that explored how smart retail services can improve older customers’ supermarket shopping experience. This paper presents an exploratory study of smart retail service design for ageing customers to have a better supermarket shopping experience. Key supermarket shopping-related issues that have been explored include difficulties to find items in store, design issues of a trolley, basket, shelf and checkout, trust issues of online payment and issues of online shopping interaction and interface design. Based on the identified shopping issues, this study developed a smart trolley prototype and a smart shopping App which aim to support older customers in better accommodating personal shopping bags, baskets and wheelie trolleys with a supermarket shopping trolley, auto shopping plan, in-store navigation, call for staff help, easy checkout and smart shopping guidance. Positive feedback was gained through the user evaluation tests and future research will focus on the further development of the smart shopping App to improve its functionality and user interface design.