iNeedStuff Shopping Assistant Review: Grocery List App That Learns As You Shop

The shopping list section of the App Store is a crowded place. With as many as there are, it’s surprising that so few of those apps take full advantage of the iPhone’s features. One that does is iNeedStuff Shopping Assitant, by PDAscent, Inc. This handy application includes location-awareness and online syncing.

iNeedStuff comes pre-loaded with a few hundred common grocery items. The user interface is a good example of iPhone app design — simple and built with standard iPhone UI elements. To add an item to your list you can start typing its name in the search box and the list narrows down quickly as you type. When you find the item you want, tap the + button for the quantity you want. If the item isn’t found you can add it from the search box.

When you go shopping, iNeedStuff uses your iPhone’s location to know where you are. For a place you’ve been to before, it identifies the location instantly. One problem with this is if you’re inside a store it can’t get a GPS location, so it could recognize the store you’re in or another nearby store. If you haven’t shopped at that location before, you will be asked to add the store or manually choose a location. From then on, whenever you shop at that store, iNeedStuff will divide your list into things you’ve bought there before and things you haven’t. As you check things off your list, the app tracks the order in which you get things at that store, so it can put them in that order for future shopping trips. The more you shop at a store, the better it learns what you buy there and what order you shop in. The down side to this is, until you have it trained for most of the things you buy, you have to scroll up and down your list a lot, shopping from both sections. There is also no way to pick a specific store where you want to buy an item.

iNeedStuff also lets you sync your list with their online site, so you can share a list with other iPhone owners. While this functionality is nice for a family that splits up the shopping duties, the online list manager leaves a lot to be desired. The interface is not nearly as attractive or usable as the iPhone UI is. After making changes to your online list you must hit the syncronize button, or the changes will not show up on your iPhone. This seems like an unnecessary extra step. The online list has also been known to hang while synchronizing after renaming an item. The changes have been saved, but the page sits there as if they haven’t. Also, location and order data are not synced, so when your family shops at a store, your iPhone does not “learn” from that shopping trip.

The app itself, however, contains lots of small UI details that make it easy to use. On the shopping list, for example, it only shows a quantity if it is greater than one.  Another nice feature is the ability to turn off screen rotation. As you walk around a store, you tend to hold the iPhone in front of you until you find what you’re looking for. Then you’ll drop that hand to your side, while the other hand picks up the item. This can cause the screen to rotate, so when you pull the list back up to look at it, it could be in landscape, or in the middle of switching back to portrait. Allowing you to turn off rotation shows attention to how people use the iPhone.

iNeedStuff is in active development, and you can even vote on new features from within the app itself. Despite the disappointing online list manager, the app itself is a very capable shopping list. iNeedStuff is currently $8.99 and available in the App Store.

share permalink ping 3 Comments