ScheduLinKR: What exactly is a Store Delivery Schedule, and why does it matter?

A trip to the grocery store is a weekly routine—we speed through the aisles, grabbing our kids' favorite cereal, fresh produce, and maybe even a guilty pleasure (mine is POM Pomegranate Peach White Tea). But we rarely stop to think about how those items actually make it to the shelves.

Store Delivery Schedules determine when stores must place orders to receive products on time. Just like needing to order from Amazon by Tuesday at noon to get a package by Friday, grocery stores follow a similar process. They must submit orders early enough for warehouses to pick, pack, and ship the products, ensuring everything arrives in time for their customers.

ScheduLinKR is Kroger's internal application for managing store delivery schedules, adapting seamlessly to both planned and unplanned changes—whether due to an unexpected snowstorm or the busy holiday season.

Balancing an Enhancement and a Redesign

With new team dynamics and a rushed deadline, we knew the ScheduLinKR MVP (minimum viable product) was far from a MLP (minimum lovable product). Packed with awkward interactions, inconsistent UI patterns, and a confusing workflow, it was clear that tackling multi-week delivery schedule creation would be our opportunity to fix the flaws in our initial design.

Schedulers could spend up to 2 hours making bulk edits to make necessary long term schedule changes, that'd they'd eventually have to do again in 6 months.

A ScheduLinKR MVP screen created without design collaboration

Testing Our Best Assumptions

"The key to considering multiple options while still moving quickly is to stop testing whole ideas, and to start testing the underlying assumptions that your ideas depend upon."

- Theresa Torres

Keeping our MVP in mind, our team had plenty of ideas to improve the initial schedule build process. Inspired by Teresa Torres' Continuous Discovery Habits, we tested our assumptions across our three best proposed solutions. Through quick user and technical testing, we prioritized patterns as the best solution—one that met schedulers' needs while still fitting within our (once again) tight timeline.

Simplifying Scheduling: Guiding Users Through Clear Steps

Redefining A/B schedules

We replaced confusing terms like A/B and Even/Odd with clear 2-week recurring schedules, making it easier to build alternating patterns and enabling 3- and 4-week recurrences for added flexibility.

Keeping it Relevant

With so much data in the app, users only see what’s relevant—data specific to stores, commodities, and warehouses. When selecting order times, they’re shown only available options for their chosen commodities. Each step narrows the focus, displaying only the data carried over from previous selections.

Demystifying Legacy Jargon:

To enhance understanding, the terms were redefined with clearer language and supported by helpful tooltips for added context.

Presenting a Complex Concept in a Simple Way

By leveraging the existing schedule card component, schedulers can now create schedules for multiple stores with just a few clicks.We replaced confusing terms like A/B and Even/Odd with clear 2-week recurring schedules, making it easier to build alternating patterns and enabling 3- and 4-week recurrences for added flexibility.

Fine-Tuning Designs with User Insights & Data

I led usability testing to dive deep into how our designs truly work (and where they fall short) for users. To capture both the big picture and the finer details, I crafted a test plan that balanced both qualitative and quantitative insights. This included tracking task completion rates, gathering difficulty ratings for each step, and observing user behavior to capture meaningful feedback. It was all about finding real-world ways to refine our design and make it even better for our users.

"The more I think about it, the more I actually really like patterns [because] sometimes A/B is too hard to track, but thinking about it as a pattern makes more sense."

Addressing Multiple Processing Times for Orders

Schedulers were concerned that orders with multiple processing times defaulted to one selection. The UI auto-populates processing times, but this didn’t work well with multiple options. As a compromise, I displayed the order and processing time pairs directly in the dropdown, matching how users read these times in documentation.

Making Pattern Creation Intuitive

Schedulers were uncertain about how to interact with schedule cards during the "Create Patterns" step. I added a hover and selected state to improve accessibility and clearly indicate the cards were interactive. This made the process more intuitive and user-friendly.

Simplifying Jargon for Clarity

Some legacy app jargon still caused confusion, like "Week Out Adjustment," which left users puzzled. I updated it to "Delivery Week" with clearer options like “Current,” “1 week out,” and “2 weeks out,” and improved the tooltip for better clarity. This made the feature much easier to understand.

Clarifying “Start Week”

Users misunderstood “Start Week,” thinking it referred to when the schedule would go live. Through testing and dev feedback, we clarified that it’s used to create alternating week schedules by defining the sequence of weeks. This change ensured the term was more intuitive for users.

The Impact

Reducing Manual Maintenance by 100%

With our enhancement, we completely eliminated the hassle of mass updating bi-weekly or delivery schedules every other week. Once a non-weekly delivery schedule is set up, it runs on its own—no more manual updates to maintain the correct cadence. In the past, mass deleting schedules for a non-weekly delivery could take up to 2 hours in one session, and deleting them weekly in another session could still take 15 minutes every other week. But the real win? No more manual maintenance. If someone forgot, it could cost the business thousands in unplanned and unnecessary deliveries. We've turned a time-consuming, risky task into a seamless, error-free process.

Reducing Build Time between 12-48%

The initial schedule build process was a tedious, time-consuming, and tough to follow. While we knew it would always take some time, our redesign made a real impact. We reduced build time by 48% for "simple schedules" (those with 3 or fewer patterns) and 12% for "complex schedules" (with more than 3 patterns).