Gorilla Shop Builder - Concept Grant recipient 2023
In the months since receiving the Sage Concept Grant, we’ve been hard at work here at Gorilla Experiment Builder on our vision of a new and improved Shop Builder.
The first and largest milestone has been adapting the framework of our second generation of tools to fit Shop Builder 2, with its updated interface and modular 'component' design philosophy. Though it integrated with the rest of the Gorilla Experiment Builder suite, the architecture of our original Shop Builder was entirely bespoke, which was the primary reason we elected to re-build the tool from the ground up in our second generation framework. We’re already seeing the benefits of this change as we develop the tool further.
Our original Shop Builder was best suited to a general browser-based e-commerce shop (such as a supermarket), and though possible, major edits to the layout or styling were complex and often required HTML/CSS knowledge. We knew there was an appetite for other kinds of shop simulations, including a food delivery 'app', thus skinnability (the ability to extend the use cases) was one of the pillars of the vision for Shop Builder 2. This is something we wanted to get in-place early in the project, and will eventually allow users to pick from a few basic archetypes – so far, we have implemented aforementioned food delivery ‘app’, and a modernised version of our original supermarket skin, though these are the by no means the only skins we intend to complete.
Constructing the delivery app skin introduced our first major challenge - we knew a delivery app would need to function seamlessly on mobile devices. Our Questionnaire Builder already supports responsive mobile use, and our Task Builder allows you to design for a mobile interface, but the layout of a whole app was a lot more complex, and some technical hurdles had to be overcome so that the live in-editor preview (a major feature of our second-generation tooling we were keen to bring to Shop Builder 2) could show the researcher an accurate mobile view of their simulated storefront, without requiring them to launch a full preview for every adjustment.
The second challenge it introduced was the concept of 'add-on' products, or product customisations and bundles. These are ubiquitous across most types of online stores now, especially delivery apps, so we needed to implement a solution that still allowed the resultant data to be easily understood.
Another goal with Shop Builder 2 was to make aesthetic customisation simpler. Whilst it was possible to customise the main colour and button colour in our original Shop Builder, in this version we've striven to make this both easier and more powerful. Colour pickers and the live preview mean you can tweak the colour scheme and see the changes immediately, on the same screen. Not only that - it's now possible to completely change the colour scheme of the simulated store with dynamic values that can even differ (or be randomised) between participants, where desired.
We’re very excited by where the tool is heading, and with all the additional flexibility the updated architecture provides. Like with the rest of the Gorilla Experiment Builder suite, this will eventually enable us to respond more readily to the needs of researchers in in the social sciences, and empower them to gather the data they need whilst remaining as simple as possible to use.
If you are curious about our Shop Builder and want to find out more, you can currently use Shop Builder 1 by following the steps below:
sign up for a free Gorilla account here
create a shop by clicking on Create > Tasks/Questionnaires > Shop Builder
check our support documentation for Shop Builder
If you’re curious about Gorilla - Sage has partnered with the team to create a series of How-To webinars - you can catch up HERE
The latest in the series is happening soon - refer to our events calendar for more details.