Article

Mobile Monday: Walmart iPad app

April 10, 2011

Mobile Mondays is a weekly column on mobile apps by retail customer experience expert Mike Wittenstein. Each week, you’ll get a test drive of a leading retail app including pictures of key features and commentary on what works—and what doesn’t.

This week, we review Walmart's new app for iPad. For the world’s largest retailer, it’s surprisingly sparse in features and offers absolutely nothing unique.

The app opens to a simple, uncluttered home page. From the start, it appears this app is an information finding utility.

The Value of the Day feature offers a single item with options to purchase, save or share. To actually buy the item, users must leave the app completely and head over to the website. No information besides the SKU is transferred for shopper convenience.

All of the app’s shopping lists appear the same way. The categories are logically organized but offer limited selection. This part of the shopper experience is unremarkable.

Shopping Lists are a handy feature. Unfortunately, you can’t sign in from the app. You have to:

1. Leave the app
2. Go to Walmart.com
3. Find where to sign up
4. Sign up
5. Verify (I imagine) your account
6. Leave the site
7. Go back to the app
8. Re-find the item you were looking for
9. Put it on your shopping list
Ouch! Sounds like 6-10 minutes easy. Two thumbs down for this "feature."

Searching is simple, but there’s no type-ahead to make finding products from the store’s 100,000 SKUs easier and product details are sparse.

The Store Finder is typical and works as expected. Clicking on an individual store’s icon presents phone numbers and hours of operation for the major departments.

Clicking on the More Info icon doesn’t invoke a feature as one might expect. It simply brings up a text screen with a description of the app.

Shopping at Walmart is hard enough. This app has the opportunity to make it much easier—but it doesn’t. In this reviewer’s opinion, Walmart isn’t working hard enough to make shopping easier for its customers.

What's Good

• The interface is simple
• The store locator is well-integrated

What's Not So Good

• You have to go to the store’s website to do any real shopping, listing or order tracking
• The Value Of The Day, Rollbacks, Top-Rated and Best Sellers lists are too similar to be separated

What I Would Do

• Start over from scratch with a key design principle of reducing customers’ shopping efforts’ in mind

• Turn the four front-page lists into a single mashup, enabling on-the-fly criteria selection

• Connect better with customers by adding a store floor plan navigation tool to give browsing and comparing products a more natural feel

• Incorporate social media comments from customers to enhance product listings

• To give the app a cutting-edge feel, tie the shopping list to the floor plan and let the app route your shopping trip inside the store more efficiently

• Allow "search by intent" using contextual search. This would make it easier to find a flapper valve when the only thing you know to type in is "my toilet leaks"