Self-monitoring of online food purchases: development of the myShop app

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Most UK supermarkets offer an online supermarket for ordering food and drink to be delivered and online supermarket shopping is expanding rapidly. The aim of this study is to develop online tools to help shoppers buy more healthy food. We are developing an online tool called the myShop app. As part of the myShop app, we have already developed a tool that can be used in six online supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda, Morrison, Ocado and Waitrose). When using this tool, the shopper is presented with traffic light labelling on all items and their total food at all times when shopping, including when searching and choosing, looking at their basket and at checkout. This allows users to easily compare the healthiness of different products. Most shops only display traffic light labelling when viewing the detailed webpage for each food and even this provision is infrequent. With myShop, the labelling simply appears on the actual supermarket websites, so the user has easy access during their normal shopping in real life. The app can also be used to choose to not be shown unhealthy products to avoid temptation. For this project we will develop the myShop website (which can be used on tablet, smart-phone or PC) to help shoppers use the myShop app to eat a more healthy diet. The new website will allow users to choose, set and change their healthy eating goals and see changes in how healthy their food shopping is over time (by viewing a graph). They will also be able to get shopping advice, feedback on how they are doing and reminders.To make the myShop app as useful as possible, we will form a steering group of the research team and two members of the public, who will oversee the project. We will carry out a review of previous studies to find evidence about what has helped people change their diet. We will use this evidence and well proven theories of how to support behaviour change to develop a plan that outlines what is needed for the content and design of the app. We will work with a very experienced website development company to produce a first version of the website. We will then carry out 'think aloud' interviews with around 20 members of the public, which means asking them to try out the website while we record their views of using it. We will use this feedback to improve the website, and will carry out more interviews to try out the new version, until we have improved it as much as we can. We will ask men and women of different ages and with different levels of education and online experience, to make sure the website is suitable for all types of people. Finally, we will ask another 20 members of the public to use the website in real life for a few weeks (to do at least two online shops), and we will interview them to find out if it is helpful or needs to be changed in any way. At the end of the project we will apply for funding for a bigger study to see whether the website does help people improve their diet.