Swiftly Tackling Inflation

Kroger

Strategy /Vision Setting / Digital Transformation / Research

CHALLENGE

Leverage design to adapt to market volatility caused by inflation, address large-scale business challenges, and meet rapidly evolving customer needs.

Role

Senior Product Designer: Led cross-organizational vision setting, research, opportunity identification, and prototype testing. Partnered with UI and domain design teams to develop concept designs and prototypes.

Framing

Understanding the Problem Space

An acute rise in inflation (+10% in Food at Home) was impacting price-sensitive customers. They were spending the same amount per trip but checking out with fewer items. Kroger had several solid savings tactics (promotions, coupons, etc.), but they were underutilized, especially through the app and website.

To develop a holistic understanding of the savings space, I facilitated an immersive workshop with over 50 stakeholders across Kroger. In real-time, we synthesized data to identify and frame key challenges:

External Threats:
Competitors with simpler value propositions outperformed Kroger in perception metrics like “Helps me feel like I’m spending my money wisely.”
The return to in-store shopping saw decreased traffic to high converting digital coupons and an increased traffic to an outdated Weekly Ad experience.
Core Problems:
Customers found Kroger’s digital savings experience nuanced and complex.
Disconnects between finding savings, shopping products, and checking out presented barriers to achieving maximum savings. Opportunities to save were falling through cracks in the experience.

The farming workshop broke down information silos, bringing together quantitative and qualitative insights as well as diverse perspectives from merchandising, marketing, data science, aynalitics, product, and design. With a comprehensive baseline of insights established, the team was able to quickly identify knowledge gaps and craft a targeted research plan.

Section of collaborative whiteboard used in framing workshop.

Research

Filling Knowledge Gaps in Real-Time

The team executed two initial customer studies that did not yield clear findings, but helped us refine our approach. We quickly pivoted, launching two reworked studies. These revealed that inconsistent promotional language caused confusion and that many Kroger Plus members were unaware of or undervalued member-exclusive deals, the program’s main offering.

Concept designs of Savings Summery feature.

Vision Setting

Collaboratively Crafting the Future

Utilizing the insights uncovered via data and research the team collaboratively crafted a vision to establish high-level direction, align partners, and breakdown complexity. We found that digital savings experiences were siloed into things like coupon pages, creating a complex journey for customer as they were forced to navigate separate shopping and savings missions. Our new vision established the fundamental concept of “savings moments” to connect Kroger’s many savings mechanisms with consistency—so as customers plan, shop, and checkout they can maximize the value they get when shopping Kroger.

Vision: Kroger can enable a sense of winning for customers by creating savings moments where they matter most across the end-to-end shopping experience.

We identified two key opportunity spaces—Clarity and the Value of Membership—where Kroger could drive long-term results. By using “Savings moments” to connect disjointed elements of the experience via a design system approach Kroger could drive greater consistency and showcase the value customers receive by being a loyalty member. Working in parallel, the product management team identified a North Star metric to measure success: increasing the percentage of savings applied per transaction.

Section of collaborative whiteboard used in vision setting sessions.

"Ian drives momentum and change in and across the organization. His name is synonymous with innovation and leadership. It is clear that his example sets the standard with how insights drive change, and guide a strategic direction."

Feedback from cross-functional partner

Prototyping

Testing with Customers for Market Fit

With a clear vision and opportunity areas providing focus, the UX and UI teams generated a wide range of concepts. After refining the ideas, we tested prototypes with customers to assess their impact on the North Star metric. We found that customers recognized and valued the new features, demonstrating strong market fit. These results allowed us to build a roadmap for the future of savings at Kroger. This roadmap guided teams across the organization to launch new experiences that helped customers save and reinforced Kroger’s leadership in the savings space.

Interaction heat-map with related study participant comments from prototype tests.

Concept designs of new member value proposition experience.

Results

A Digital Ecosystem that Delivers Value

This initiative resulted in a connected omnichannel savings offering, shifting the majority of savings transactions from in-store to online. This contributed to a +14% year-over-year growth in eCommerce and an increase in in-store sales, driven by digital savings tools. The savings features differentiated Kroger from competitors and were leveraged by marketing to drive digital engagement.

Marketing placement featuring Kroger's redesigned shoppable Weekly Ad.