We partnered with AisleSync to surface the gap between its intended identity as a trust-based grocery recommendation network and how users were actually experiencing it. The work gave the founding team clear, evidence-backed signal on what was blocking adoption before the next phase of product investment.
AisleSync is a social grocery app built around a clear thesis: trusted recommendations lead to better purchasing decisions. The product had a functional build and a defined vision: a network layer over grocery shopping where users discover products recommended by people they follow. But the founding team needed evidence, not intuition, on whether the experience was actually communicating and delivering that value.
Studio Marelle engaged in two phases: a Product Clarity Audit to surface micro-level friction in language and interaction patterns, followed a year later by a structured usability study explicitly scoped to test not just usability but adoption, whether the product made sense immediately, felt valuable, and would realistically enter users' grocery behavior.
Outcome: Surfaced a critical perception gap and delivered a prioritized action framework ahead of the next product phase.
Research across two phases surfaced three signals that shaped the adoption strategy:
- Users didn't just miss the value. They each invented a different one. Across 8 sessions, no two participants described the same product. One understood it as an ingredient scanner. Another as a grocery delivery app. A third as a multi-store list organizer. A fourth as a price comparison tool. Only one participant, who had the exact use case AisleSync is designed for, understood it as a recommendation network immediately. A product that generates five completely different first impressions has no anchoring frame at all. The problem wasn't that the network layer was invisible; it was that nothing was visible enough to override users' existing grocery app mental models.
- The scan flow was positioned as utility, not discovery. Users encountering "Scan barcode" defaulted to a lookup mental model (checking an ingredient, comparing a price) rather than a discovery one. This wasn't a feature problem; it was a framing problem. Repositioning the action around what the product actually delivers ("Scan to see what others recommend") was a low-effort change with direct impact on how users understood the product's value.
- Without saving or list functionality, there was no integration point with real shopping behavior. 6/8 users explicitly asked for a way to save products they wanted to try. The sharpest signal came from the one participant who immediately understood the product's value: they'd recently had to text a friend to ask what a product was, found it annoying, and said they would have used AisleSync instead, if there had been somewhere to save and revisit it. The concept was valid. The loop wasn't complete. Without that bridge, AisleSync couldn't become a habit; it could only be a one-time visit.
Phase 1: Product Clarity Audit
- Audit across homepage, scan flow, product interactions, and authentication entry points, focused on microcopy, labeling, and interaction patterns
- 6 prioritized findings with specific language and interaction recommendations, each rated by impact and implementation effort
Phase 2: Usability Study
- Research design including full test plan, 5 formal research questions, and participant criteria, scoped explicitly to assess adoption signal, not just usability
- Session guide with structured moderation protocol covering first impressions, 7 core tasks, and post-use adoption probing
- Participant recruitment and facilitation: 8 moderated remote sessions with intentional grocery shoppers (prioritizing California residents and Trader Joe's shoppers, excluding food/retail industry professionals)
- Synthesis of 4 primary adoption barriers with observational frequency counts across sessions
- Findings and recommendations report covering overall adoption signal, key friction points, patterns across participants, and prioritized action framework
- Decision framework separating surface-level friction (resolvable through copy and visual hierarchy) from deeper product framing gaps (requiring structural changes to how the network layer is surfaced and experienced)
AisleSync entered the next planning phase with a clear, evidence-backed picture of where the product was losing users, and why. The work separated two distinct categories of problem: surface friction resolvable through language and visual hierarchy, and a deeper framing gap requiring the social layer to become structurally visible rather than passively present. The founding team moved from internal assumptions to grounded signal on what users understood the product to be versus what it was designed to be. That distinction between perceived utility and intended value became the foundation for confident, prioritized product decisions at exactly the moment when getting it wrong would have been most costly.
