Kroger Weekly Delivery

Kroger Rush was a pilot program for a limited catalog of items delivered in 30 minutes or less for a fee.

Client and Platform: Kroger, eCommerce Innovations Team, iOS & Android

Time: February 2020 - November 2020

Role: Product Designer - Visual Design, User Research, User Experience

Sprint Cycle: One Week Sprint

Kroger Weekly Delivery was designed to test and prove out a more direct delivery model within the Kroger organization.

While working with an assortment of 30,000 SKUs, Kroger Weekly Delivery allowed users to build their weekly basket and reserve their spot on a delivery truck each week.

This allowed for customers to order their groceries in a contactless delivery method while allowing Kroger to be more sustainable and cost-conscious by batching deliveries within a constrained area.

Challenge:

Kroger Weekly Delivery had a quick time to market due to stakeholders wanting to take advantage of the grocery delivery surge due to COVID-19.

Launch to local employees and their families to test the product in real-time.

Information Gathering:

I spoke with our stakeholders, my direct project manager, the operations lead, and potential users about what they were looking for in a grocery delivery product.

I also explored our two largest competitors in the area, Instacart and Shipt. Kroger had an existing relationship with Instacart, and I was able to access some cart data through this partnership.

Through this research, I was able to guide the design process by leveraging average cart size, reviewing how competitors handled individual features and utilizing operations capabilities for showcasing categories and branding.

Goals:

Keep It Simple, Silly: Due to the fact that we wanted to get to market as soon as possible, I did not want to re-invent the grocery delivery wheel and process.

Be Agile: Be responsive and receptive to user feedback. Ask for it often.

Standout: Keep the process familiar, but make sure users knew it was a different product offering from Kroger's current 3rd party delivery.

Ideation and Process:

Because of the time to market constraints, I decided that I would be relying heavily on Kroger's Design System, Kroger Internal Design. Up until this point, I had very little experience with the design system. This allowed me to iterate with a plug and play methodology, allowing for more focus on iteration and quick response to user feedback.

Kroger Weekly Delivery launched two months after development and design began. To begin with, the service launched to local employees and their families through managed accounts, tied to their Kroger employee ID. I decided to push for an employee only launch to test not only our operations but to make sure our experience was similar enough to the flagship website to be understandable but different enough to make it clear that this was a separate option from Kroger's current modalities (ship to home, store pick up, and delivery via 3rd party).

To participate in the launch, employees had to agree to fill out a survey form after each delivery.

Feedback and Moving Forward:

The internal launch went well. Through the employee surveys, one comment came up several times was the need for substitution and out of stock communication.

At launch, if an item was out of stock, we simply omitted its information from the recent orders page, leading the user to discover that this item was out of stock when it was not delivered. There was no capability for substitutions built into the product at all.

I responded to this feedback by creating a labeling system that clearly marked items in the Recently Delivered (Order History). In addition, I used this opportunity to clarify the Order Summary section, making it clear what payment method was used, what savings a user received, and overall reworked the typography for legibility.

Results:

Via the post order surveys, we found that users were extremely happy to have the full look of their order. Satisfaction scores for the Recently Delivered section rose from a 2.5 to a 4.

Kroger Weekly Delivery spent a month in employee-only access and recently launched to the public with great adoption numbers. The service is currently operating at 75% of operational capacity.The next step for the project is to bring in personalization features that are tied to a customer's loyalty ID. These features will surface items based on a customer's past shopping behavior, speeding up their cart building process.