Within the UX arm of Kroger Digital, a common responsibility is research—ranging from usability testing to written tests to moderated interviews. While I was the Product Design lead for our front end Loyalty team, we ideated and built out the (still unreleased) Kroger Rewards Center.

One of the unexpected results of the COVID-19 pandemic was that customers, forced to stay at home, were not driving and therefore had no use for their accumulated Fuel Points. The Rewards Center was a new way for users to redeem their Fuel Points for other items or services.

Research Background

Fuel Points are a hugely motivating incentive for our customers, many of whom have been redeeming their Fuel Points while transacting at the pump for years. With this study, we sought to understand how this [bias or preconceived notion or something] affected the way they thought about redeeming points on something other than fuel.

Research Questions

1. Do members understand how Fuel Points are pooled?

2. Do they understand Fuel Point expiration, and how that relates to reward expiration?

3. Do members understand the 2 balances: prior month and current month?

4. Do customers understand that monthly balances can't be combined?

5. Do members understand that 100 Fuel Points is also the required increment to redeem rewards (i.e. 100, 200, 300 Fuel points can be redeemed for a reward, not 50 or 175 or 280; must be in increments of 100)?

Task List

1. After a brief explanation of what Rewards Center is, navigate to Rewards Center.

   1. To understand where users instincts would tell them a program like Rewards Center would live

2. Add A Reward

   1. Before probing the users about program terms and rules, we wanted to throw the user right in and see if they could perform the core task of adding a reward to their card.

3. Find the reward they just added

   1. Determine a users understanding of what happens after a reward has been added

   2. See if a user understood "Ready to Redeem" and "Redeemed"

4. Add a donation type Reward

   1. Since there were two separate buckets to redeem from with potentially different rewards, we put the donation reward in the bucket that isn't shown by default to see if it was discoverable, and what the users thoughts were on the different rewards pools.

   2. As a secondary goal, we wanted to know if it was clear that for the donation reward type there was no further action required beyond redeeming it.

5. Add the free delivery reward.

   1. In the prototype, the "free delivery" reward was 'unaffordable' based on the current users points. We wanted to test if our messaging was clear around this scenario.

   2. Additionally, the user had enough points across both buckets to afford the reward, just not in one singular bucket. We also sought to understand the users instincts and reaction around not being able to combine buckets.

Affinity Mapping

Throughout the interviews, observers and note takers were creating stickies using the Rose, Bud, Thorn method. After the interviews were finished, we regrouped over several affinity mapping sessions to find common themes across the interviews.

Themes vs. Insights

Once we finish the affinity mapping exercise, we would analyze the clusters and those would become our themes. Once we had the themes we could synthezise those to create what we called Insights.

What We Learned

Ideally, some of this research would have been done at the beginning of the project phase, but with our business unit specifically, the UX research practice was not as mature as it could have been. This research was done at the end of our discovery phase which prevented us from making some high level program changes, and limiting us to doing what we can at the experience level.

Detailed Findings Examples

Finding 1: Users found the "Fuel Points" name confusing.

• User quote: "That says 'fuel points.' If I saw that I'd leave right away because I don't drive."

• Recommendation: With the rollout of Rewards Center, rebrand to something a little more universal. (eg. Rewards Points, Points, etc.)

• Outcome: Ultimately the business wanted to keep the name fuel points.

Finding 2: Several factors hindered participants from easily find the Rewards Center.

• Users viewed Rewards Center as such a core feature, there was an expectation of Rewards Center to be in our quick links bar (Our most frequently visited nav above the header on every page.)

• Recommendation: Put RC in the quick links.

• Outcome: Ultimately, Rewards Center got deprioritized, so development conversations never got this far.

Final Output

On top of the above detailed findings and Insights, we found multiple smaller usability issues like contrast and readability problems within our prototype that we quickly fixed and tested using UserZoom (instead of another round of moderated testing which is more expensive, involved, and had longer lead times.)

At the time of printing[?] we have been unable to release, monitor and restudy this feature due to shifting business priorities causing this to be pushed out at least a year.