Healthy
Eating
Experience

Designing a multi-surface digital experience to support healthier food choices at scale.

Years
2023-2024

Company
Kroger Heath

  • OptUP is a digital health initiative within Kroger’s ecosystem designed to help customers make healthier food choices over time. Embedded across Kroger’s digital experiences, OptUP combines nutrition science, personalization, and lightweight behavior-change mechanics to guide decision-making during everyday shopping.

    Unlike transactional products, OptUP needed to:

    • Feel supportive, not prescriptive

    • Balance scientific accuracy with approachability

    • Integrate seamlessly into existing shopping flows

    • Scale across a diverse customer base with varying health goals

  • Product Designer — Health & Wellness

    I led UX strategy and experience design for OptUP, owning the end-to-end experience across relevant digital touchpoints. My role focused on translating complex nutrition guidance into clear, motivating interactions that fit naturally into Kroger’s broader ecosystem.

    Scope included:

    • Experience strategy and interaction design

    • Information architecture and scoring clarity

    • Personalization and progress feedback patterns

    • Gamification concepts and behavior-change mechanics

    I partnered closely with Kroger Dietitians, Food-as-Medicine leadership, product management, engineering, and analytics to ensure the experience aligned with both clinical guidance and product realities.

  • Nutrition guidance is inherently complex — and often overwhelming.

    Key challenges included:

    • Communicating nutrition scores without confusion or judgment

    • Encouraging behavior change without increasing cognitive load

    • Supporting diverse user needs, goals, and levels of health literacy

    • Embedding OptUP into existing shopping journeys without disruption

    From a UX perspective, the risk was creating an experience that felt:

    • Too clinical

    • Too vague

    • Or disconnected from real shopping behavior

  • I approached OptUP as a supportive system, not a feature.

    My focus was on:

    • Clarity over completeness

    • Progress over perfection

    • Guidance over instruction


    Key principles guiding the work:

    • Make nutrition feedback easy to understand at a glance

    • Reinforce small, achievable wins

    • Personalize where possible, without over-complexity

    • Design patterns that could evolve with future health initiatives

1. Nutrition Scoring & Feedback

Problem
Customers struggled to understand how nutrition scores were calculated and what actions they should take next.

Solution Highlights

  • Simplified score presentation

  • Clear explanations tied to everyday food choices

  • Visual hierarchy that emphasized guidance over raw data

2. Personalization & Motivation

Problem
A one-size-fits-all approach risked disengagement across different user goals and lifestyles.

Solution Highlights

  • Designed personalized nudges based on behavior and preferences

  • Introduced progress indicators to reinforce positive momentum

  • Framed recommendations as encouragement, not correction

3. Ecosystem Integration

Problem
OptUP needed to feel like a natural extension of Kroger’s digital ecosystem, not a standalone tool.

Solution Highlights

  • Integrated OptUP into relevant shopping and browsing moments

  • Aligned UX patterns with existing platform behaviors

  • Ensured consistency with broader design system standards

Key Design Areas

Outcomes & Impact

As OptUP evolved, the experience became:

  • Clearer and more approachable for customers

  • Better aligned with clinical nutrition guidance

  • More engaging through personalization and feedback loops

The work helped establish:

  • A scalable foundation for future health initiatives

  • Stronger alignment between UX, nutrition science, and product strategy

  • A shared language between design, dietitians, and product teams

What I learned

Designing OptUP reinforced the importance of:

  • Treating behavior change as a long-term relationship, not a single interaction

  • Designing with empathy for different motivations and constraints

  • Collaborating deeply with subject-matter experts outside traditional product roles

  • Building flexible systems that can grow alongside evolving health strategies

What’s next

Future opportunities include:

  • Deeper personalization tied to customer goals and history

  • Expanded feedback loops across additional touchpoints

  • Continued integration with Food-as-Medicine initiatives