Kroger Ad Platform
Project Overview
Project Owner: Anika Gupta (UX Designer)
Background: This project focuses on evaluating the Kroger Ad Platform (KAP) to identify critical feature gaps and develop a feature recommendation that will add value for advertisers to optimize their campaigns.
Scope
Product Research
Information Architecture
Testing
Duration
10 Weeks Worked 5x a Week
Tools
Figma
JIRA
The Problem: There is a gap between the features currently offered by Kroger’s Ad Platform (KAP) and those available on leading platforms, limiting its ability to meet advertiser needs.
The Solution: I designed an intuitive A/B testing tool for the KAP that addressed a key feature gap identified through competitive analysis and stakeholder feedback. My design focused on simplifying the setup and enabling advertisers to run data-driven experiments and optimize their campaigns more effectively.
My Role:
Product Research, Competitive Analysis, Stakeholder Interviews, and User Research, Ideation, Wireframing, Prototyping, A/B Testing
Discovery
Def
ine
Design
Testing
Design Process
Investigation of Ad Platforms
Determining which feature to design
Designing the Feature
Evaluating the Designs
Discovery
Investigation of Ad Platforms
Understanding Ad Platforms:
I started by researching Kroger, Walmart, Amazon, and other ad platforms to understand how these ad platforms work and what they do. They all follow a basic userflow with the same goals of helping an advertiser create a campaign for their product.
Camapaign Creation Process:
Example of Information Architecture:
There are a lot of terminologies in Ad Platforms like ad groups and creatives. The best way to understand them is through their information hierachy.
Organizing My Research:
After understanding the structure of ad platforms, I gathered screenshots from other competing ad platforms and arranged the screenshots by the standard userflow on these platforms.
Optimizing My Research:
With a lot of different information, I wanted to figure out how to consolidate it with the help of Perplexity, an ai-powered search engine, which is great for research. It gave me competitive analysis tables and sources to expedite my work.
Competitive Analysis
I put all the information from the research and analysis of platforms into a final competitive analysis which were highlighting features that Kroger's Ad Platform is missing.
From a product perspective, the research identified potential features, but the focus now was on choosing one that would truly deliver value to advertisers, rather than becoming just another unused addition.
Def
ine
Determining which feature to design
Filtering through the options:
To figure out what feature to design, it required weighing multiple factors, which led me to narrow the list down to five potential options.
Factors:
Industry Research: The competitive analysis and research
Internal Feedback: Interviews with designers and product managers working on KAP about stand-out features.
Business Value: Product managers looked at the list and talked about the value add for the business.
Final 5 Features:
These are features that have been implemented in top platforms already and advertisers have been asking Kroger Ad Platform to integrate them.
Competitive Landscape
Analyzing how these features compared across competitors revealed that some were unique gaps in Kroger’s Ad Platform.
Feature Ranking Interviews:
To narrow five potential features down to one, I interviewed:
3 KAP activiation team members who work closely with advertisers
5 product managers who understand feature value and feasibility
These interviews focused on identifying the the most usable, desirable, and feasible option for KAP ranked on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being high, 5 being low).
Interview Results:
I calculated weighted averages of the features, leaving me with 1 cummulative value for each feature.
The interviewes put the A.I performance recommendations feature as their top. I wanted to investigate this more because I had interviewee notes.
After looking at the interviewee notes, I began to realize that A/B testing tools might be the right feature to go ahead with.
Scoring Matrix:
To make sure A/B testing tools was the right feature to go ahead with, I made a value matrix to compare the effort by business vs. value for users based on a few factors.
Factors:
Interviewee Feedback
Interview Data Results
Competitive Analysis
This left me to conclude A/B Testing Tools
as the final feature as it was both lower effort
by the business to implement and advertisers
really wanted it on the platform.
