Silver Shoppers: designing a better supermarket service for the older consumer Seminar

Due to the remarkable growth of an aging population across the world, the elderly consumer is regarded as a vital segmentation by the retail industry. This seminar will introduce a research project which aimed to investigate the challenges and difficulties that elderly consumers face during their supermarket shopping process, in turn to understand the way in which supermarket service and environment design can improve elderly consumers’ shopping experience. In this project, an ethnographic user study method, which includes direct observations and in-depth interviews, was employed to explore the elderly consumers’ shopping behaviour and experience so as to identify challenges that they currently face during the shopping process. Subsequently, co-design workshops were carried out to promote potential design solutions for retailers to improve their service for the elderly consumers. Based on the research results, it has been found that the main difficulties British elderly consumers face at a supermarket environment include poor access to products, inappropriate size of products and poor signage. Recommendations and suggestions have been provided for retailer to improve their service for the elderly consumers. Future research plans will be presented in the seminar as well.