Grove Collaborative Mobile App
Did Grove Need a Mobile App?
In 2018 Grove Collaborative had a simple question — should they create a mobile app for their loyal customers? Grove shoppers already loved the service, and spent time managing their product subscriptions on the website a monthly basis. We wondered if there were opportunities to leverage a native mobile experience to help their customers shop new categories and find new products on their mobile devices.
Research & Customer Interviews
Over the course of a six-week discovery period, my team sat down with Grove customers and stakeholders, iterated on clickable prototypes, and conducted a series of surveys to better understand how Grove’s customers shopped and how they engaged with the existing web experience. The findings gave the team a clear path forward, to create a native mobile app focused on existing customers, and taught us a thing or two about how folks think about taking care of themselves and their homes.
Delivering Customer Value
The entire creation of the mobile app was focused on providing an enhanced experience for existing customers, encouraging them to explore the product catalog and manage their monthly shipments.
Getting Technical to Enable Great Experiences
In order to make the mobile app a success, all existing functionality needed to be made accessible for the second application to ever consume the same data.
As a result existing APIs were documented with Postman, tested, and updated to ensure that each screen of the application only got the data they required. Over time, this led to restructuring of APIs for the website, and helped the Grove engineering organization move business logic out of the application layer.
Overall, this work increased the speed of launch for the mobile app, reduced engineering maintenance across systems, ensured consistency across experiences, and allowed for an easy follow on launch of the Android app.
The Results Are In
Within weeks of the iOS app launch in April 2019, the app had a 4.9 star rating and was #15 in the shopping app ranking in the iOS app store.
Fast forward to 2023, the main structure and flow of the app remains unchanged, though there have been some lovely feature enhancements and visual design tweaks that make the app sparkle. After all that time the app has retained the 4.9 star rating now with 25.3k reviews.
