APRIE Product Innovation
Problem Statement: dunnhumby’s commercial insights product suite has aged and lacked innovation since the company sold part of its business to Kroger 10 years ago. The current experiences are siloed, don’t meet an evolving set of user needs and feel dated from a usability and industry standards perspective.
Project Goal: Create and deliver a single dunnhumby commercial insights flagship product experience that will put dunnhumby on an innovation pathway that scales the business to meet users true needs.
My Role: As Director of Design at dunnhumby, I’ve led the end-to-end design strategy, execution, and delivery of a unified platform experience—transforming four siloed commercial insights tools into a single, cohesive solution. Over the past 1.5 years, I’ve guided this vision from initial discovery through implementation, with a focus on creating a product that enables grocery retailers to access, interpret, and act on data with greater clarity and confidence.
In my player/coach role, I managed a team of four designers and partnered with 10 cross-functional development teams. We employed the Double Diamond framework to navigate the complexity of the redesign—first uncovering user pain points and systemic inefficiencies, then converging on high-impact opportunities to improve usability, consistency, and business value. This structured approach enabled us to align stakeholders, validate solutions, and deliver an experience grounded in real user needs.
Client
dunnhumby
Year
Nov 2023 - current
Project Kickoff and Process
By conducting qualitative and quantitative research, cross-functional interviews, and usability assessments, I surface unmet user needs and uncover actionable opportunities to improve the platform’s coherence and performance. These insights inform the design direction, helping to reimagine how disparate tools and workflows can evolve into a unified, intuitive experience that better supports the full lifecycle of insight generation.
With a clear product vision grounded in user needs and business goals, I work closely with product managers, engineers, data science partners, and commercial stakeholders to define and deliver a future-forward, single-platform experience. My goal is to reduce complexity, improve usability, and create a more cohesive environment where users can easily access, organize, and apply insights that drive meaningful outcomes.
Better understand users through User Archetypes
Through our user research with external clients and internal client leads we were able to define different user archetypes to gain a holistic understanding of our users, their key jobs-to-be-done, how they fit into the larger ecosystem of the grocery retail industry.
These archetypes allow the product trio to have more confidence in understanding the experiences we needed to build to support these different user archetypes, how they all work together and interact to accomplish the different phases of their jobs.
Object Oriented UX (OOUX) Approach
Using a new and emerging technique that is focused on bringing the user mental model closer to the architectural object model to ensure there is modularity and scalability of an experience supported by an underlying platform of services and data science.
Learn more about OOUX here: https://www.ooux.com/resources/object-oriented-ux
Identifying core system objects for the future APRIE platform
Prioritized Objects
Nested Object Matrix
Call to Action Matrix
Object Map
Composable and Modular UX
1st Experience - Performance Center
While we were doing the OOUX work we also had to start to build the first version of the first APRIE core modules focused on pure business performance. This was focused on reducing the # of reports run in our current heritage products, reducing the time for users to get to insights and understanding where they need to dig in further to analyze the layers of their business.
Performance Center > APRIE
Our 6 month roadmap started to show how the experience would evolve from the Performance Center experience into the first delivery of value within the APRIE platform. This was pivotal in architectural and engineering cross-functional conversations because we needed to ensure we transitioned to a truly modular, composable and scalable long term platform experience.
APRIE Concept Testing
As we moved from Performance Center to APRIE we wanted to image the true conceptual experience that our experiences would be using, test that and get end user feedback. We conducted 1:1 moderated user interviews with over 20 client lead (sales), current client users and non-client users to refine the direction that we wanted to go.
Concept 1
Concept 2
Concept 3
APRIE Evolves to use new design system
Close partnership and evolution of our design system allowed us to showcase the power of the new design system with our new innovative platform experience in APRIE. This gave confidence to our executive stakeholders and end clients that dunnhumby can and is innovating in the market and improving their experiences they offer.
Current State
The APRIE experience is currently undergoing holistic usability testing of the entire end-to-end flows for each individual user flow to ensure it is usable, makes sense to users and will help them achieve their goals. This is focused on talking to 27 external end users and internal client users to ensure we capture a large range of our user archetypes. From this testing, the results will be shared back with my cross-functional partners to then inform product roadmaps.