Kroger

Kroger Rush

Being the largest food retailer in America, Kroger aimed to deliver essential food when it is needed the most — after hours. I am walking you through the journey of how I along with an ambitious team, piloted a food delivery service within weeks.

PROBLEM

What's for dinner tonight?

Working parents feel overwhelmed to make healthy dinner after work. Insights from the research agency partner of Kroger, 84.51° showed initial evidence on the existence of the problem.

ANALYSIS

Seeing the big picture

Leadership was looking for a disruptive model that challenges the conventional approach and practices of the organization — Jodi, VP Digital Experience

Establishing a working incubator model was the primary objective to test ideas quickly in the market. I wanted to make sure the design delivery process and culture is set forth, supporting that big picture.

CHALLENGE

Starting from scratch 🤔

I realized that the environment is of a typical startup with limited resources; I used my personal laptop while awaiting the corporate laptop to arrive with tools installed for about a few months. Having said that, I was happy to embrace the challenges with the creative freedom that the senior product owner Rachel provided.

The newly recruited team from all backgrounds across domains was definitely a challenge considering the monumental task to create 2 apps in 8 weeks; customer app and a driver app.

PLAN

Setting right expectations

In order to define the personas for the product, I wanted to discover and interview the right target audience. To land on an informed solution, I coached the team to conduct 5 day design sprints regularly to test big ideas with customers.

Establishing a transparent culture was key for me to encourage the team to contribute in creating a shared design environment.

ROLE

Owning research and design

We traveled to Cincinnati and observed the after-work shopping behavior of the customers. I conducted contextual interviews on the spot to understand their pain points. We have invited a few potential target audiences for a moderated user interview.

Bringing the team onboard to an efficient 2-week design delivery process was effective in solving a problem with business and building the solution with developers.

I took the responsibility to get cross-channel buy-in for the design direction. Constant collaboration with the branding team, helped me align the new visual theme with the parent brand.

APPROACH

Failing fast to learn

The design sprint enabled us to solve problems, test ideas, and ship the final solution with less friction.

Buying in a multi-cultural team to conduct design sprints every other week was not easy. Industry leaders Google, Apple, Amazon embrace failing fast approach by testing ideas quickly with the customers. With the help of videos from design channel AJ&Smart, I was able to persuade the team to involve with confidence.

MARKET ANALYSIS

Delivering under 30 minutes

The market was full of competition with world-class delivery services from UberEats, Postmates and PrimeNow. Analysis led us to pursue the selling point of delivering a limited catalog under 30 minutes.

We found that a new startup goPuff is disrupting the market targeting college student demography in delivering essential stuff such as toilet papers, snacks and candies across campuses.

DISCOVERY

Meeting millennial moms 👩‍👦

Prefer healthy snacks for my kids after school. Essential baby needs and medicine. Fresh food like rotisserie chicken, salad, drinks and snacks after hours. I am happy to pay a reasonable fee for a service that can solve these urgent needs on time — Mom

We interviewed a group of moms to understand their needs and aspirations deeper. The feedback directed us that the millennial moms best suit the solution we are trying provide solving the problem of urgent needs (including dinner). We also conducted a card sorting exercise to capture their mental model about the essential items they would require.

After interviewing the working parent demography, we determined Melinda as the primary persona for the rush service.

The card sorting exercise revealed the essential items moms expect in 30-minutes.

PHASES & METRICS

Starting with associates

We projected to scale when we meet the metrics and KPIs defined for each phase. This allowed us to progress with evidence showing product feasibility, desirability and market viability.

This gave us the opportunity to analyze the operational capabilities within the Kroger store in meeting the 30 minute delivery mark within a 5 mile radius.

DESIGN GOALS

Mapping metrics with design

We used the OKR (objectives and key results) method to set and meet business goals. I mapped the required design changes which helped keep track and measure success.

For instance, I wanted the team to answer what are the motivations and rewards for a customer to continue using the service.

We defined product offers and design principles such as engaging communication with a cheeky tone rather being mundane. Ashley, helped us crafting those messages across our channels which was well received by customer (associates) and reflected in the numbers.

I was grateful to the Ping pong table at work which was a great stress buster. The friendly doubles tournament helped create a great synergy within the team. Thanks to Dave, Our Scrum master, for organizing.

FLOW

Visualizing the user journey

Envisioning the end to end customer journey, helped identify gaps to fulfill and opportunities to delight.

INTERACTION DESIGN

Satisfying business and user needs

Explore as a guest

Add to cart fast

Know total price

Get value for signing up

Buy it for a lower price

Avoid errors

Get order updates

Listen to the customers

PROTOTYPE

Creating rapid prototypes

Creating concepts in full color was efficient to gain feedback with stakeholders. And it was handy to tie them into quick functional prototypes using axure to test.

Later during the launch, It helped me put together a quick app preview for the app store which was effective in showcasing the function of the app rather just screenshots.

Rush App preview for the app store.

TEST FINDING

Proving our assumptions wrong 😯

We assumed as a team, that exposing products at the home page will be preferred by customers to access them straightaway without navigating too much. But customers proved our hypothesis wrong conveying "Keep it simple and don't make me think/work"

CONCEPT 1 : Expanded Categories

CONCEPT 2 : 10 Category Tiles

I couldn't find an item after scrolling a category in the home page, and I have to click "view all" to start browsing all items in the category again! -- user

Concept 1	Heuristic	Concept 2
20%	Easy to discover	80%
20%	Attractive Interface	80%
25%	Easy to navigate	75%

VISUAL DESIGN

Appetizing home page

Users found food colors and imagery appealing to witness and interact with. I used that evidence to persuade the branding team to retain the visual treatment of the 10 food categories.

DEVELOPMENT

Increasing efficiency

Reducing the design dependency for developers was my goal. Creating a style-guide with design components, avoided developers from waiting for the final designs at the end of every sprint.

By sharing the designs with them in invision, I delivered final designs cutting down 2 days of time in creating visual specifications for IOS and Android.

I removed the need for visual specifications by scaling up developers to get measurements directly from invision inspect

Guide for common design components used across the app.

Invision inspect removed the need for creating visual specs.

IMPACT

3.7 star app rating 🤩

Data indicated that we are failing to bring the customer back to use the service. I proposed motivating customers to provide feedback on what they are looking for will help.

So we asked the shoppers to hand a personal thank you note in person asking feedback. We received a lot of interesting feedback and ideas to improve the service. The shoppers also felt motivated and connected.

It reflected in the 3.7 app rating which is well past the targeted goal of 3 stars for the pilot service.

We needed customer feedback to improve retention

Personal thank you note from shoppers to new pilot customers

The negative rating was all about limited service locations.

OUTCOME

Exceeded expectations

We overwhelmed the leadership with the team's ability to bring an idea to market within few weeks overcoming all the challenges. Jodi, VP Digital Experience gave a shout out to the rush team in the all associate meeting and encouraged other teams to follow the rush model to ship ideas quicker.

I feel so proud of having had the opportunity to own and lead the design from scratch. I am grateful to the startup environment presented to showcase my design leadership.

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