Crolist: A mobile app for collaborative grocery list management

Abstract

As smartphones serve many purposes, and they are increasingly becoming an integral part of human lives; digital grocery lists created using mobile apps is the most relevant solution to overcome the limitations in paper-based grocery lists. Although the digital grocery lists align with the current human lifestyle and technological trend, they are unable to support collaborative environment in which they do not provide the facility to share a grocery list among household members. Therefore, the existing digital grocery lists require enhancement to support the collaborative function in creating and managing grocery lists. This paper discusses the development of a mobile application (app) for creating and managing a grocery list collaboratively named CROLIST. It is a digital grocery list that can be used by a group of users to generate and manage grocery lists for a household. CROLIST was developed following rapid application development methodology, and an evaluation was conducted to measure the usability of the app in facilitating the creation and management of grocery lists collaboratively. The results of the evaluation suggested that CROLIST is sufficiently usable in terms of usefulness, ease of use, satisfaction, and supporting the collaborative features for the household needs. Nevertheless, the evaluation revealed that the respondents anticipated that the other household members would add unnecessary grocery items to the lists when the collaborative features are available. Further studies are needed for identifying the effective control mechanisms for more usable shared grocery lists.