Just noticed this has arrived on the iPhone Apps list - Ocado - the UK delivery service for Waitrose supermarket have launched a free iPhone app called Ocado on the Go, allowing customers to browse groceries, place and manage orders, and effectively shop through their iPhone.
It's nice, cleanly designed app that goes through a number of steps when you fire it up for the first time:
- You have to agree to the ts&cs
- You have to login (or register)
- You then have the option to create a 'quick pin' 4-digit PIN, rather than remember your more complex web password (nice touch this - don't think I've ever seen that before).
- It downloads the 'product catalogue', which is a fairly hefty 21.16Mb, but means you can shop offline
- It loads your 'account data'
Once you're 'in', you can:
- Book a delivery
- View your orders
- Start shopping
Booking a delivery first lets you choose from the addresses stored in your account, then heads off to a calendar interface to choose a day and timeslot.
'View orders' allows you to view an overview of pending and past orders, and also delve into a full listing of all the items in the order, which is impressive.
Start shopping is of course the business-end of the whole app. Impressively, it shows full details and images of items, along with a functioning basket and total cost counter at the top of the app that updates - much like their site - without any need for a page reload, or iPhone equivalent.
The app's pretty chuggy when scrolling lists of items - it looks like it loads content as it displays it, leading to a delay for each item coming up. It's fairly annoying and may benefit from pre-cache, although the iPhone 3GS may be better (I have the original 3G).
Adding an item immediately updates the total cost shown at the top. You can tap an item for full info (ingredients, storage info, manufacturer, country of origin, country of packing, package type and even recycling info), the same as seen on the website.
Another nice feature is that you can 'zoom in and out' of shopping 'aisles' to show more info (i.e. pictures) or less (just titles) to get more or less on screen. Curiously, removing the pictures doesn't stop the chuggy list scroll so this may be a general issue of the iPhone having to parse data bit by bit and slowing down as a result.
My lady and I use Ocado all the time, so she'll be wrapped about this new app. We have an order already (correctly listed and displayed in the iPhone app I might add) so I haven't yet tested placing an order, although I made a fake one (but didn't submit it) and it worked exactly as I'd expect.
I work in digital - marketing specifically. One of the main triumphs of this application is that, not only have they made a great app that focusses exactly on what you need it to do without being distracted, it performs almost exactly like the website (albeit smaller, naturally). The huge benefit of this is that all of Ocado's customers will already be familiar with it. There's no need to re-learn what you know: getting product info is where you expect it to be; adding items to the basket works as you'd expect; the total cost is where I'd want it to be and works how I'd expect. The production team on this have done a great job of porting the business to the iPhone, and (presumably, at least based on my experience) have managed to keep the application focussed, without getting distracted by adding pointless Twitter-post functionality, or 'share my shopping list with the cloud', which would have delayed the release massively.
Overall, a really nice application that does what it says on the tin.
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