A powerful app for drivers

In 2018, I was a part of the founding team who had to come up with a brand new platform that will enable crowdsourced drivers to pick grocery orders from Walmart stores and to deliver them to our customers. 

There was a growing demand for home deliveries of groceries and parcels but increasing last-mile costs made this proposition quite expensive. To bring down delivery costs we had to come up with a model to expand our delivery network without having any impact on our customers. In short...

“Build the largest, trusted and cost-effective on-demand last-mile delivery network in the United States.”

A welcome video we created in 2022 for the drivers.

Once the customer places an order, two applications have to work seamlessly

Spark Driver - A mobile app used by drivers
Spark Dispatcher - A desktop app used by the call center agents, store associates, and operations team.

Let's Spark it up

The goal was to have a design language that is fresh and relates to the brand image of the company.

All the elements were inspired by the Walmart logo.

A constantly evolving Design language

Utilizing blue from Walmart's branding felt like the perfect start to defining the Spark language as well. The brighter version of the blue evokes a refreshed feeling out for users and is paired with the teal which creates a nice balance between calm and energetic. 

The typography, icons, and illustrations on Spark were very defined based on the Walmart branding. We settled on Rubik for fonts and crafted over 100 unique icons that fit the language and adding more as new use-cases surfaces. The screen takeovers had Two-tone icons. And, yes... We had fun designing playful toy-like illustrations.

Putting it all together

We started work on this initiative with a release that was scheduled for July 2018. This could not have been possible without collaboration with teams across Development, Product, Business, Operations, and Legal who constantly pushed the boundaries of what can be achieved in the limited time we had.

During the process we partnered with AnswerLab who recruited and conducted multiple user studies with Drivers who were part of the different gig economies.

🚀 Launch

Launches are exciting and equally stressful.

We traveled to Nashville a couple of days before launch. We were dogfooding the app and made a couple of deliveries. This was followed by constant communication with the Dev team to squish out the bugs that were encountered during and after delivery.

On July 10, 2018, we created history by delivering using the Spark Delivery app.

We launched a bunch of features and even fixed a lot of bugs. Spark soon was one of the talked about products in Walmart and also won multiple awards within. The biggest sense of accomplishment was when we received a note from Greg Foran who went on a surprise field visit and delivered a couple of orders by himself.

Pandemic 2020

2020 was a challenging year for the whole world. 

Since the pandemic, delivery saw a surge in volume in a way we had never expected. Together as a team, we ideated and rolled out features that ensure the safety of the Associates, Drivers, and Customers. We introduce No-contact delivery and ensuring all the safety protocols are communicated to the drivers.

We built a platform for the drivers who were the frontline workers. We saw a lot of love being showered by our customers who truly valued the efforts that the drivers are putting in.

Expanding the Spark ecosystem

After the launch of the Spark Drivers app, we have expanded the platform to different countries and also added new capabilities which allow the drivers to earn money in different ways. I also got to collaborate with more designers and be part of reviews that helped refine the overall platform.

In August 2021, Walmart announced a new delivery service business called Walmart GoLocal, which allows other merchants to tap into Walmart’s delivery platform to get orders to their customers. Spark Driver app will now play a central role in delivering orders from external clients to their customers as well.

Spark Shopper is a crowdsourced platform that lets drivers shop and delivers Walmart groceries to the customer.

View Project

Task as a Service is a platform that allows core Spark drivers to have more options to earn money doing gig work.

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