In early November of 2021, Kroger announced the launch of a 2-tier membership program called Kroger Boost, which offered double fuel points and free grocery delivery to program members. The launch of Boost was big news in the grocery retail space as well as the Cincinnati community in general. Kroger Boost was created because we saw an opportunity to be competitive in the marketplace and bring value to our customers (through more fuel points and greater accessibility to groceries/delivery). Many other retailers (like Walmart or Costco) have implemented membership or subscription programs that have soared in popularity over the last few years; it only made sense for Kroger to throw its hat into the ring.

My Role

I was the Product Design Lead during the development of Boost, and had several responsibilities throughout the development cycle. These responsibilities included creating wireframes and user flows of the front end experience, creating automated user tests to both inform and validate our final design, and facilitating collaboration sessions with a multi-disciplinary group to map and define our "Awareness and Education" strategy.

In addition to those steps (which helped inform our front end design), I led a study of the end-to-end enrollment experience, in which I developed the testing plan, moderated the interviews, facilitated Affinity Mapping sessions, and developed the final report. Our primary measure of success for launch was enrollments; as of mid-November of 2021, Boost has only been out for a few weeks, but we have been surprised and excited to see that we are far surpassing our goals. In the first weeks since launch, our enrollments have been X% higher than our goal, and is estimated to drive around $YY in revenue thus far.

Front End Experience Development

Boost was a huge undertaking, and when it comes to a project of this magnitude, you have to start with the basics. The first thing we had to tackle was developing the front-end experience for enrolling, and managing a subscription-based membership was entirely new to the Kroger digital customer experience.

One of the first problems we ran into was deciding how customers would select and enroll in their preferred program tier. Being an e-commerce retailer, we had an existing checkout experience that had been tested and largely deemed successful. We had initially wanted the user to select their desired membership package from the traditional "benefits matrix" and launch that user directly into our checkout flow which saves existing users' info. This would make enrollment in Boost a simple, two-click process for existing users who had previously placed an order with us (a group that was our target audience for the initial launch). Due to technical constraints around validating a users' eligibility for the program based on their address, we simply weren't able to have users select a package and create a checkout from our educational pages. Our solution: Develop a page dedicated to address validation and package selection that would live between the educational experience and checkout experience.

Once a user had decided to enroll, we needed to give them a way to manage their membership. While we had an existing way of checking out, a page that allowed you to view and manage a benefits program was uncharted territory for us. Since this was a net new experience that we had no knowledge on, I set out to understand what users expected and needed out of a management page. I decided to run a survey through UserZoom where I had users rank information that could be included on a management page by most important, expected, and least important. Using the results of this test, I created a priority guide to dictate the information hierarchy for the Membership Management page, which our team used to inform the final design.

End to End User Interviews

Once all the pieces of the Boost experience had come together, it was time to test our final product.

Since Boost was a brand new venture for Kroger, we knew our customers would have a lot of questions. To better understand our customers' mentality around Boost, I developed and ran a study of the end-to-end enrollment flow that also served the secondary purpose of checking the usability of our experience. Overall, I wanted answers for the following questions:

1. What questions does a customer have about the mechanics of the program?

2. Where would a customer go to learn more about the program?

3. At any given point in the experience, do we give enough information about the program to empower our customers to make a purchasing decision?

4. Once a user has enrolled, do we give them everything they need to engage with the program to its fullest extent?

 With those questions in mind, I developed the research plan, discussion guide, and a screener targeting existing Kroger customers who use our delivery offerings (our primary audience for the first wave). The study itself consisted of ten 60-minute, one-on-one user interviews that I moderated. While I moderated, the rest of our team and select stakeholders observed and took notes. After the study was over, I facilitated several affinity mapping sessions with our stakeholders to identify themes and synthesize insights from those themes, which helped inform the final report.

We found that our enrollment flow itself was easy to use, and generally users understood the program enough to want to enroll, though there were several misinterpretations of the program that, while not critical, will need to be addressed. Unfortunately, due to the scope of development and tight timelines, we weren't able to act on any of our findings before launch, but we prioritized opportunities to tackle post-launch.