LEAP
Leading edge advertising platform, first of its kind to connect advertisers with digital digital displays in-store
The ideal scenario
This was an amazing project and team to work with. I was engaged at the very earliest conception of this product, when it was just a glimmer of an idea. I worked closely with the Director of Sunrise, the PO for LEAP, and several senior developers / data architects to flesh out the initial requirements and work through discovery. Never have I experienced UX being brought in so early, and it really paid off. Although the product was ultimately unsuccessful, the UI consistently performed well, getting excellent reviews from our small and dedicated customer base.
Understand & define
When I arrived at the Cold Spring Lab, the floors were cement, everyone was sharing tables set up in a single conference room, and we were sketching our ideas on whiteboards on the floor. It was surreal and exciting having a startup experience within such a giant corporation as Kroger.
Sketch & decide
I did a LOT of paper prototyping for LEAP, both in the earliest phases of the design process as well as throughout the nearly 2 years I spent evolving and maintaining the product.
Prototype & validate
Throughout the entire process, we were validating and testing our ideas and prototypes with our users within the Consumer Packaged Goods companies, marketing agencies, and retailers that would be our users.
Original "North Star"
The "North Star" was what we called the ultimate product vision. It was the idealized version of what we wanted to build, vs the MVP which was what we would be handing off to devs each week.
MVP
Over time, we honed our initial concept into a robust, easy to use app full of useful features for building an ad and linking it to products in store. At it's most complex, the ad creation process had 5 steps. We planned for many steps to be eliminated as we built a database of associations between products based on the ads built by our CPGs.
