Offer Creation Tool
Ahold Delhaize is a multinational retail and wholesale holding company that owns 19 retail shops worldwide, serving 60 million shoppers every week in the United States, Europe, and Indonesia. As part of their merger, the company needed updated internal tools to support their increased demands.
Role
UX Designer
Tools
Miro
Figma
Team
UX/UI Designer
Business Analyst
Design Thinking Facilitator
Duration
4 weeks
"How Can We Make our Offer Creation Tool more effective so our team can work more efficiently?"
Ahold-Delhaize was using a tool called Bolt 1.0 to manage the offer creation tool between their various retailers. The creation team would create dozens of events, which would each contain anywhere from 10 - 1000 promotions before sending their work to the QA Team, which would have to validate the information manually before the event date started. Once the event was completed, the archival team had to store the data on a massive Excel spreadsheet. Super Admins monitored the workflow and overrode any errors, ensuring that events that were entered late would be released before the deadline.
Challenges:
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No set archival system within the tool, forcing the archival team to rely on an external spreadsheet
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Tremendous amounts of user error when entering promotions forcing delays in the QA Process
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The tool could not set priority to events, so super admins would manually verify events.
Solution
After a series of audits to see the depth of the issues, I worked with the marketing department to
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Reorganize the site map
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Clarify Major Actions for users
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Elevate Branding to a more modern look.
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Restructure Visual hierarchy on product pages
Design Process
Our team started by discussing how we would facilitate the various interviews and sessions required to understand the intricacies of the current product, focusing on a Design Thinking framework.
We created a shared Miro board in order to share and comment on information asynchronously.
We aimed to simplify the amount of manual entry and repeat work in the current system, as well as introduce an archival data repository to store completed events within the system.
Overall, the client was incredibly satisfied with the planning behind the prototype.
If I were to do this again, I would focus on reorganizing the client sessions to better structure the way our team was educated on the current tool. We would focus more on interviewing the users with the aim of centering a newer tool based on their feedback, rather than focusing so heavily on how the stakeholders viewed to be the issues with the current tool.
Our Client, Ahold Delhaize, came to us and had 1 big question:
"How do we make our Offer Creation Tool Better?"
It's an honest question. But it doesn't give any information to render a response.
Their Offer Creation Tool they currently used (Bolt 1.0) was a relic designed to manage the Promotional Events across all their grocery store chains, with multiple tools that were added as needed, resulting in a long series of band aid solutions.
So, I worked with my team to start asking questions through interviews to figure why their tool wasn't cutting it.
What did the users say?
So I think to myself...
"How do we fix this?"
I worked with the client to display flowcharts and other visualizations to express how the workflow process would proceed with all the necessary players involved, as well as all the considerations for when things go wrong, which was a major concern for the clients.
"Will this work?"
This is where I could start sketching to build low-fidelity wireframes as we build through several rounds of prototyping.
The most important part was showcasing how the client would be able to edit events and pull old events from a searchable archive within the tool.
Outcomes
Our final prototype focused on a full walkthrough of our Product Flow, with each determined user flow included within the Overall Flow.
Attempting to spend so much time understanding the previous tool ended up slowing down time, as we found it difficult to stop the client from focusing on smaller details enough to consider the bigger picture.
