Walmart Digital Shelf Labels

Background

Walmart stores have over 120,000 products on shelves, each with an individual price tag. Every week, stores support thousands of pricing updates for new items, rollbacks and markdowns. Digital shelf labels allow updating prices using a mobile app, reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and giving associates more time to support customers in the store.

Challenges

Today, associates have a tedious, open-ended process for setting digital shelf labels. Digital shelf labels are a central cog in a wheel known as modulars. Without a guided process, modulars can start their lifecycle with errors, leading to further decline that results in poor customer experience and reduced store success.

Opportunity

Create a comprehensive (and guided!) mobile app experience for digital shelf labels and the modulars that encompasses it, that enables associates to confidently set and manage modulars and ensure their health throughout their entire lifecycle.

What is a modular?

Physically, a modular is a set of shelves – typically broken down into 4-foot sections – with a specific place on the shelves for each product Walmart sells. Modulars give products a dedicated home in Walmart stores and provide customers with a consistent shopping experience. They also make it easier for store staff to stock and maintain merchandise, track inventory, and smoothly replenish products. The health of a modular is determined by the accuracy of the items placed on the shelves as well as how up-to-date the information displayed on the digital shelf labels are.

Process

We kicked off our six month stretch with a 3-day workshop engaging our product, business and engineering partners in discussions around what a North Star experience might look like for modulars and around defining the concept of modular health. Then we spent the next few months ideating, conducting user research, gathering knowledge from SMEs, and finalizing product requirements. After many iterations and reviews with leadership, we designed a North Star modulars experience that would guide associates to set and maintain modulars (and inherently, digital shelf labels) throughout its lifecycle. This experience would also be used to guide any incremental work we would ship on our way to our ultimate vision.

Solution

If we consider our North Star experience a story, the experience can be broken up into two key chapters. Chapter 1 is about guiding associates to set modulars right the first time. This means that when a modular starts its lifecycle, proper guidance allows efficiency and accuracy to place the correct item information onto all the digital shelf labels. Chapter 2 then provides insights and guidance for associates to maintain the health of modulars throughout the course of its life. This means that as modulars inevitably accrue errors, we drive users to take action and resolve errors, again with efficiency and accuracy.

Impact

Reduction in errors

By providing guidance for associates, errors in digital shelf labels is reduced.

Reduction in time

By decreasing the time spent setting and resolving mods, store efficiency is increased.

Improved satisfaction

By keeping inventory accurate, customers’ shopping experience is improved.