Sometimes the best experience is the one that’s most familiar, and that’s the angle an online supermarket has taken, delivering an app with the experience of browsing your local.
That’s the approach Aussie Farmers Direct has taken, at least, building an app for the iPad that tries to replicate the aisle-to-aisle shopping experience on a digital platform.
Called “AisleOne”, it’s an initiative by the company to try and get more people to feel at home when they’re shopping online, providing the brick and mortar experience without actually having to enter a brick and mortar place of business.
You might even call this “skeuomorphism”, a term that implies design is supposed to look like something real world, like the way Apple’s old Notepad app on the iPhone and iPad pre-iOS 7 looked like an actual notepad, or the way the iBook library looked like a library or a bookstore shelf.
For AisleOne, this use of skeuomorphism is in place to make things easier for people who want food and other items for around the house delivered to their door.
“AisleOne is the first online shopping platform to take the best aspects of physical retailing and recreate them digitally,” said Keith Louie, CEO of Aussie Farmers Direct.
“It’s such a fun and engaging user interface,” he said, adding “we expect it to drive a new wave of customers to the business who prefer the app’s simplified yet thoroughly immersive approach to online shopping.”
We mentioned earlier that the app has been built for the iPad, and that’s the only place you’ll find this app thus far, though we were told that an “Android version will be available by the end of the year”.
On either platform, once goods have been ordered, you’re given a sort of an Esky device that you leave outside for the delivery people to put your groceries into.
We’re not quite sure how this works for units or flats — houses should be fine — but a representative for the company told us that apartment blocks with restricted access to the customer’s door is more challenging, though we suspect it can probably work this out.
Once you have the delivery down, though, you’re one step closer to never having to go into a supermarket again. Sundays will never be the same again.
