Kroger E-Commerce COVID Response
It should come as no surprise that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 changed everything for Kroger and its teams. Nearly overnight, our customers' needs, and their shopping behaviors, shifted radically; meanwhile, the company had to quickly react to skyrocketing e-commerce sales while implementing stringent safety protocols to protect shoppers and employees alike.
Our team started working from home, but we put in long hours in those early weeks and months to understand our customers' problems and implement solutions quickly and safely.
Methodology
We created a "SWAT Team" of front end product leaders, consisting of Product Managers and Product UX Leads, to respond to these new customer problems. The urgent nature of these issues, combined with the need for a lightning-fast turnaround time, prevented our usual full discovery process. So we:
Analyzed the customer feedback and usage data available to us to understand the problems as best as possible.
Rapidly prototyped solutions to the problems, presenting them back to the larger SWAT team for discussion.
Then worked closely with our UI designers to create a final design and quickly test them in UserZoom (our UX insights solution) to turn them around for development.
My Role
As the lead designer for our Cart and Checkout products, I was responsible for rapidly prototyping solutions as part of this "SWAT Team."
Customer Problems
Like everything else in those early days, our customers' needs were changing rapidly; to understand why, we closely monitored our customers using a combination of qualitative and quantitative inputs. Based on our internal analytics suites and customer feedback channels, we were able to identify the following problems.
Problem 1:
Increased demand for both grocery pickup and delivery meant less available time slots for both; additionally, customers complained about the lack of in-demand items (a moment of silence for all of those who went without toilet paper in those early days).
If the store the user was looking for had no pickup slot available, we offered them the option to switch to our Mt. Carmel location, which was designated as a "pickup only" store. Initially a pilot, this capability was later rolled out to offer the users the option to pickup at any other store in their area, not just the "pickup only" location in Mt. Carmel.
When no timeslots for the pickup modality were available, we recommended the user switch to the delivery modality. (Note: Because of complications with fulfillment and assortment causing item fallout, which this page was not built to handle, our short term solution prevented us from allowing the user to switch to delivery within this flow, and users would be re-directed to their Cart, seen in Image 1A).
For operational efficiencies, we had previously only allowed users to schedule an order up to 4 days out. Because we didn’t believe the Customer Experience was limited to whenever they used our app or website, we collaborated with our Service partners to implement the capability for users to schedule up to seven days out, which allowed a greater chance of getting a pickup or delivery timeslot.
Problem 2:
Since a large portion of customers had never placed an e-commerce order prior to the pandemic, we had to re-vamp our customer education and post-order instructions.
Based on customer feedback, it was clear that the users who were new to our e-commerce offerings didn't fully understand what happens after the order has been placed. Using a previous card sort and survey on the "Order Complete" page, we added information that customers identified as key to understand what happens after they've placed their order. We also collaborated with our customer communications team to include this information in the Order Confirmation email customers receive after placing their order.
Note: Most of this information was actually included on the "Order Complete" page prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, as a result of user feedback and extensive research. However, when I was shifted to another team, the UX designer who replaced me (and who is no longer employed with Kroger) removed all of it, describing it as "clutter." With the onset of the pandemic, the information was re-instated under my recommendation based on that previous research.
Problem 3:
A blessing in disguise to introverts everywhere, the pandemic resulted in a demand for less human-to-human contact. In response, we had to implement the capability to let users receive their delivery orders without interacting with the driver—something that Kroger had never been capable of offering before.