Helping ALDI understand the end-to-end grocery shopping journey and identify customer-centered opportunities for improvement and differentiation.

  • Role: UX Researcher — primary note taker & insights contributor

  • Team: Cross-functional research team

  • Timeline: 3 week research engagement

  • Client: ALDI

  • Scope: Qualitative research, thematic analysis, personas and journey mapping

The Challenge

ALDI needed a deep, evidence-based understanding of how customers experience grocery shopping — from planning to post-purchase — to inform strategic decisions and identify opportunities to strengthen ALDI’s value proposition and customer differentiation.

Context & Constraints

  • Extensive 20 one-hour user interviews required careful planning, recruitment, and consistent documentation.

  • Diverse participant pool meant balancing varied habits and expectations (price-focused, convenience-focused, exploratory).

  • Needed to align internal team insights with client expectations, particularly around features like curbside.

  • Final deliverables were research artifacts (themes, personas, journey map) rather than actionable UI designs.

The Solution

We delivered a multi-artifact research pack that articulated customer behaviors and needs in a way ALDI stakeholders could directly use:

  • Six high-level themes capturing motivations, barriers, and perceptions in grocery shopping.

  • Three personas (Savings, Utilitarian, Exploratory shoppers) that highlighted distinct customer mindsets and drivers.

  • A comprehensive journey map spanning planning, purchase, fulfillment, and re-engagement — with pain points, thoughts & feelings, opportunities, and quotes embedded.

These artifacts helped internal teams and the client align on customer priorities and spotlight opportunity areas (e.g., curbside experience prioritization).

Research insights presented in final client deck

Outcomes & Impact

  • Provided ALDI with evidence-based customer insights that directly informed the internal narrative and shaped parts of the client pitch deck.

  • Elevated confidence in customer understanding across organizational stakeholders.

  • Team’s research was integrated into internal strategy artifacts and referenced in final client presentations.

My Role & Ownership

I acted as the primary note taker during all user interviews, contributed to debrief synthesis and theme development, helped create the personas and journey map, and supported presenting key insights to internal and client teams.

Key Decisions

  1. Prioritize Deep, Empathic Qualitative Research

    We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with participants recruited across key demographic segments to ensure a comprehensive understanding. Pre-interview homework (participants shopping at ALDI and documenting it) enriched our contextual insights.

  2. Synthesize Findings into Actionable Frameworks

    Rather than surface individual quotes, we organized research into six high-level themes, then translated those into three personas and a multi-stage journey map to show gaps, pain points, and opportunity spaces.

Reflection

This project strengthened my skills in:

  • Conducting rigorous qualitative research at scale

  • Synthesizing diverse data into compelling themes and personas

  • Translating research insights into strategic frameworks (like customer journeys)

  • Presenting research findings with clarity and stakeholder impact in mind

“[The client] passed along that one of the [ALDI] Presidents said it was some of the best external work he had seen! Congrats to you all. Every single person played an invaluable role and you should be very proud.”

— Andrea Rasmussen (Team Member)
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