The Tesco Store and Product Finder is an iPhone application.
It not only helps you to locate your nearest UK Tesco store (of any size from Express to Extra) but also will help you find any grocery product in that store by describing its aisle and shelf. The application is free and available worldwide although it only works for UK stores and only with grocery products (rather than non-food items) at the moment.
This application is the first piece of innovation that has come from Tesco.com's R&D-run IT Innovation Club, where we provide the resources, time, and stamp of approval for our staff to quickly create innovation for our customers outside of our standard production work schedule. The Tesco Store and Product Finder was designed and built by Tom Courthold who works in Tesco.com's IT UI team; the data was - and is - sourced by Mike Brearley who now works in our IT branch dev team, with backend API server programming.
The application uses iPhone's location service to detect where you are, then connects to our server to find out your nearest stores. Touch 'Find products in this store' above and you get to the following screen. Tap the 'search box' to make the keyboard appear, and type a product to find, followed by the 'Search' button. Back comes the product list (up to 20 products) matching your search. If we have photos of any of these products, they will be shown alongside the product. Now touch the desired product to bring up its location details, alongside a bigger image of the product - and its full location information.