The above shows a representation of my team’s ownership (Albertsons Shopping Experience Team) and the various initiatives surrounding the transaction journey I helped support, including cart & checkout, payments, wallet, flash delivery, pharmacy drive-up & go integration, fulfillment, and edit support.
Project: DriveUp & Go + Rx Prescriptions
As lead product designer representing the grocery checkout team, my task was to find a way to communicate to the drive-up and-go grocery customers of Albertsons free service for bundling both grocery and pharmacy orders into one single pick-up. One of the challenges involved how to address privacy and protected health information, which for us on the grocery side meant not knowing if the user had an existing Albertsons Rx account, let alone if they had a prescription ready for pickup.
To go about this we defined the constraints and the what-if scenarios to adequately engage with the user. The first scenario depended on the location selected by the user did not have a pharmacy in the store then there would be no mention of the service available. The second scenario shows an order placed screen with a banner that informs the user about the ability to bundle grocery and prescriptions orders, however since the chosen drive-up and go option is outside of pharmacy hours, prescriptions can not be handed off to grocery delivery employees. Lastly, in the third scenario, the customer’s drive up&go fulfillment slot falls within pharmacy hours and therefore a call to action is presented to the user to log into their Rx account (via the web version) or the Albertsons Rx App to continue the user flows and bundles both orders together.
The ability to add a prescription pickup to customers’ existing grocery orders introduced a new challenge when modifying those grouped orders. Since the pharmacy delivery was subject to pharmacy hours any modification to the grocery order pickup time would affect delivery. To make shoppers aware of their grouped order I added messaging to the order tracker on the main page and inside the order details page. If a customer were to edit delivery time and click on a different time a message would appear to prompt the shopper that their order is linked to their pharmacy delivery now and they could either proceed to cancel the unwanted change.
Project: EBT Change store solution
When EBT shoppers are ready to checkout they have the option to pay with EBT or another form of payment or both. In the case where EBT money has been allocated for the transaction, there exists the possibility that a shopper may want to exit the checkout screen and return to the online store once they decide to change store location. In this scenario, the EBT shopper is faced with the unpleasant experience of having to reallocate their EBT amount at checkout as that entered amount can’t be moved from one store location to another.
To help shoppers better anticipate this negative experience, I presented multiple solutions to warn shoppers the moment they change store location. Shoppers are prompted with a scenario of what will happen with such action and also provide both the ability to proceed or cancel their action.
Solution 1
The moment the user selects the new location on the “find a store near you” modal, they are prompted with a warning message about what will happen if they change stores
Solution 2
A warning modal immediately prevents the user from making any selection informing what will happen and the ability to cancel or change stores and reallocate EBT credit.
Project: Proactive Substitutions
Another part I took ownership of was smart substitutions, essentially it involved the “unhappy” experience of having to replace selected picked items on your cart for different ones. The goal was to find a way to soften the hit as you say and introduce substitutions in a more proactive way for users. For my initial ideation and analysis, I explored similar competitive experiences and looked for opportunities to make a bigger impact by studying their flows and identifying pros and cons. In my findings, it became clear that there needs to be a way to make this alternative selection as easy and painless as possible.
Project background
67% of brand customers who shop within a given quarter do not return the following quarter. One of the biggest reasons that they don’t continue shopping in eCommerce is, 1) Out of stock at fulfillment is 14% and 2) 46% of customers reported they received irrelevant substitutions. The primary reason for this is customers are unable to select their substitute/backup product in the UI (web & app) as we don’t surface any messaging for items that are most likely to go out of stock. Getting our low inventory/likelihood-to-be OOS (out of stock) subs experience is pivotal for customer retention and loyalty.
A huge part of my strategy involved an extensive competitive analysis to better understand how others solved the same problem or at minimum intended to. Not only did I research within the industry but I also searched outside the direct competitive landscape. Additionally, I dedicated time to read industry articles such as Baymard Institute among others, regarding the topic of grocery substitutions.
