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Kroger Merchandising Supplier Experience

Service Blueprint, User Journey MapDesign Workshop Facilitator, UX Research & Design

Kroger logo

I led a core cross-functional team in collaboration with several cross-organization teams to map out the current ecosystem of Kroger merchandising users, tools and services in an aim to understand how to improve our internal data flows and tools. Additionally, I led and worked with a cross-functional team to build a user journey to understand the consumers of our merchandising ecosystem.

Please note: Due to the confidential proprietary nature of work, design examples below are modified to obscure confident details. Additional design examples will can be made available upon request.

1Business Objectives

For these efforts, I partnered cross-functionally with product management, engineering and stakeholders and we identified a need to better understand:

  1. The current ecosystem supporting merchandising item data, as there was fragmented knowledge and no centralized understanding
  2. Specific human journey of a group of users (merchandisers) operating within the ecosystem to identify target users and their current day needs and pain points in working with Kroger

2Service Blueprinting Workshop

I co-led the planning and facilitation of a series of workshops across several months to bring together a current day understanding (and associated gaps) with our ecosystem supporting merchandising item data. For this, I interviewed stakeholders to understand the aim of this and intended outcomes, for which we were looking to bring together fragmented knowledge and dig into any gaps for a centralized understanding of the current state of the ecosystem.

3Service Blueprint Synthesis & Artifact

Using Mural and working remotely, we were able to gain an initial understanding (and identify gaps and questions to be explored) on how our merchandising item data was collected, integrated, and moved through external and Kroger products and tools leading up to the customer purchasing experience. This blueprint was used to share across teams and with stakeholders to identify opportunity areas to explore (leading to additional usability testing and journey mapping efforts).

Mural screen capture of service blueprint

4User Journey Workshop

As a result of the service blueprinting efforts, we also identified an opportunity to learn more about the user journey for one group of users (merchandisers) for whom we wanted to improve the experience after gaining learnings of our current ecosystem. I partnered directly with product management and collaborated with marketing and merchandising teams in a series of workshops to map out the current user journey.

5User Journey Synthesis & Artifact

Using Mural and working remotely, we mapped out the user journey and brought this deliverable to stakeholders and teams to share learnings and assumptions on our users (proto-persona) that allowed us to identify tools to usability test and additional customer interviews to plan and conduct for data-driven learnings.

Mural screen capture of user journey

6Results

As a result of this work, we were able to:

  • Bring together fragmented knowledge and visualize the architecture and service processes of our current merchandising data ecosystem through service blueprinting
  • Bring knowledge, assumptions and questions around current users of our merchandising ecosystem (proto-persona)
  • Build empathy for consumers/customers of our merchandising data ecosystem (merchandisers) and identify potential pain points, gaps, and needs
  • Identify opportunities and potential solutions towards those opportunities that could support our continued evolution and improvement of merchandising