Design at Co-op plays an important role in solving users’ problems and Co-op achieving its goals. We advocate for user-centred design, accessibility and a full-service view as key to Co-op’s success.
The design leadership team are made up of 2 Heads of Design and 5 Principal Designers. We cover our Co-op businesses and colleague facing services, manage our large team of designers, and push forward our core design disciplines. These are interaction design, user research, content design, service design, CRO (conversion rate optimisation) and SEO (search engine optimisation).
In its current form the design leadership team has existed less than a year. We’ve been busy forming teams, building relationships and delivering for the Co-op businesses, our members and customers. We’ve been sharing challenges and supporting each other, but not spending enough time together working as a group. We needed to focus on why we exist, what value we can add to the design team and what we want for the future.
We reflected on our purpose by taking part in a workshop
It was important we took a step back and came together, because as a team, we should have a purpose we align on and can refer to. Our purpose is for our group – it’s not a design strategy. Design strategy is related and part of the wider goals that we share with other digital colleagues.
Our purpose is a way to focus on the things that are important to us and how we want to grow and enable the design team.
What we did
The workshop (devised by Imran Afzal, our Interaction Design Principal) was split into 6 parts and helped to guide the group towards creating a purpose statement.
Thinking about our values
We discussed the unique qualities we bring to the team and the values we hold. We grouped these into themes.
Discussing our shared history
We took the time to understand each other and the events and influences that brought us together. This gave us a shared empathy for our individual stories and motivations.
Designing leadership posters
We created posters that described the role of leadership in the design team. This helped us visualise our shared challenges and our goals.
Defining our team purpose
We defined our purpose by asking:
why does our team exist?
what is our motivation day in, day out?
what are we trying to achieve long term?
how does our work make the world better?
Bringing our purpose to life
We considered how we might bring our purpose to life by asking:
what behaviours will bring our purpose to life?
how can we bring our purpose into our day-to-day work?
how can we serve our purpose better?
how can we inspire others around our purpose?
Our purpose statement
“The Design Leadership team enable designers to make meaningful change”
Breaking that statement down, we intend to:
enable our design team to succeed by helping them to grow in their careers through developing their craft and themselves, and making sure they have the confidence to innovate and challenge in the ways they work
ensure we design in a way that is meaningful, creating the conditions where ethical, accessible and sustainable user-centred design can flourish, in turn benefiting our users and the Co-op
Alongside this we made a set of commitments and behaviours that would help to drive this purpose forwards.
The commitments that design leadership made are to:
try things and be bold
increase design literacy across disciplines (outside of design)
share our vision for the future of design at Co-op
have challenging conversations
define ways to measure design value
share our story (failures and successes)
The behaviours that design leadership will display are:
bravery
openness
kindness
vulnerability
reflection
listening
Conclusion
We haven’t changed how we think about design by doing this. Much of it we already do quietly, and our objectives align to these commitments, behaviours and purpose already. However, by saying it out loud, we have a reference point to guide us as well as a benchmark to ensure our team’s future and culture can be measured.
What’s next
We’re already working on objectives that align to our purpose. We’ll remain open as we keep working.
Our Funeralcare team ran a discovery into how we can help people who are dying, which we call ‘imminent need’. For people in this situation, it’s after the time when it’s advisable to buy a funeral plan (pre-need) and before the time when someone dies and someone arranges a funeral for them (at-need).
To make the most of everyone’s time on the discovery, the team ran a design sprint with 16 people to create a shared understanding of our insight and generate ideas around how we could start to help people better.
Sharing research generated interest in the work
As part of our discovery, we interviewed colleagues and subject matter experts. People were excited that we were looking into imminent need and keen to follow our progress. After our research, we held a playback of our work and explained that our next step would be a design sprint. Lots of our colleagues expressed an interest, including our Chief Commercial Officer, and we were keen to follow up with these people.
What is a design sprint?
A design sprint is a method of generating lots of ideas collaboratively with people spanning different disciplines and business areas.
The ideal number of attendees for a design sprint is around 4 to 8 people. This makes sure there’s enough time for the valuable discussions that happen as part of the process. Usually, if you involve more than 8 people it can become hard for everyone to contribute and feel heard, and the session agenda can become difficult to manage.
Why we chose to run a big design sprint
Our design sprint team totalled 16, including two facilitators.
We were hesitant – it was a big group and we had concerns about being able to get through all the sprint activities and have enough time for discussion. However, we felt we could manage this and there were some good reasons to go ahead with a big team.
We wanted to include the broad knowledge across Funeralcare and avoid extra meetings
Our design sprint team represented skills and knowledge from teams across marketing, commercial, propositions, operations and funeral homes plus design, research and product.
Having all those people in the room meant we could discuss barriers and opportunities in real time and within the context of each person’s role. This also meant we could avoid having lots of additional meetings with people to provide updates or answer any potential unknowns.
We wanted our colleagues to get the experience of being in a design sprint
The main value of a design sprint is the rapid validation of ideas, but there is also huge benefit in bringing engaged stakeholders on the journey and the relationships we can develop in collaborative sessions.
Our purpose wasn’t to bring in people who didn’t want to be there or would likely be disruptive to have in the session. It is still a good idea to push back on unreasonable requests to take part where it is likely to negatively affect the session and outcomes you want from the design sprint.
We also wanted to make sure all six of our ‘imminent need design team’ could come along. We put a lot of emotional investment into the research and it was important to make sure everyone got to see the discovery through to the end. Plus having the balance of designers in the room also helped with managing the flow of the day.
For some people, this was their first design sprint. For most, it was the first sprint since COVID changed how and where we work. Bringing people from across the business to work together in person is a powerful thing and it was incredibly valuable to showcase that.
How we ran the design sprint
We chose to run the design sprint in person as we felt it would be easier logistically and would provide the fun design sprint experience that we wanted people to have.
We followed a format similar to Design Sprint 2.0, which condenses the traditional 5-day format into 4 days and only needs the full group for the first two days. By shortening the time, we hoped to make it easier for people to attend without the need for lots of diary juggling or planning months in advance.
Our sprint team included our core project team of design, research and product, plus 9 people from around the Funeralcare business. We had two facilitators to support the large group (and each other). We spent one and a half days together as a larger group, then the core team continued remotely for the final days of prototyping and testing.
Day 1 (half day): Understand
We wanted our design sprint team to have a shared understanding of our research and insights. To do this we shared:
a simple journey map
a clear problem statement based on our research
lightning talks on different aspects of the research
During the lightning talks we asked the team to generate ‘how might we’ (HMW) statements around the problem areas.
We did not have time for everyone to present back all their HMWs, so we summarised themes, asked everyone to add their HMWs to a theme and dot voted on the most important themes.
Day 2: Diverge and converge
After recapping on the themes, we did 2 rounds of ideation using a 3-step sketching process. Usually, we would give each person 5-10 minutes to present their ideas back, but this could have taken a full day which we did not have. Instead, everyone discussed ideas in pairs or small groups and then fed back to the group for a wider discussion.
We originally planned 3 rounds of ideation, but we had so many great ideas from the first round, that we realised we would cover all the themes with 2 rounds and make better use of the time.
The 3-step process included:
Mind-mapping
Rapid 8s
T-bar sketching
In the afternoon each person picked an idea from the morning that they found interesting and presented it back to the group for feedback.
The group then dot voted on the ideas. We gave everyone 3 blue dots to vote on the ideas they wanted to take forward the most. We then gave everyone pink dots to vote on anything they thought had been missed. The blue votes tended to focus on things that were practical and that people were more sure about. Some of the themes that only had pink votes, were ideas that were more experimental or things we’d not tried before.
Day 3 and 4: Converge continued, prototype and test
The core project team continued the rest of the sprint remotely. We focused on narrowing down what we were going to test then set to work on the prototype which we tested with some of our funeral home colleagues.
Outcomes of the design sprint
The design sprint was a great success. We generated a broad range of ideas, some we tested successfully and some that will contribute to future workstreams. We have since released guidance content for a person who knows they are dying and someone supporting a person who is dying. This is the first small step in what we hope will be many more in helping people with this need.
And importantly, there was a feeling of togetherness and brilliant discussions happened in the room. The agenda was tight, but the pace of the day kept energy levels and engagement high.
We had brilliant feedback on the sessions. It’s exciting that people are reaching out to ask if we could help them run design sprints or similar ideation workshops for projects in their own teams.
Our tips for running a large design sprint
Have two facilitators
Having more than one facilitator for a session this large is a must because it:
makes it easier to keep an eye on time and make any agenda changes, whilst helping people in the room and listening to conversation
helps manage energy levels of facilitators as you can switch between the two roles above and lead different sections of the day
means the facilitators are supported by each other
Be mindful of group mix and personalities
Strong personalities can create challenging workshop environments and the more participants you invite, the risk increases that you have one or more people who might (unintentionally) derail your well-planned agenda. We were lucky that we knew none of our participants were likely to behave this way, but it is something to be mindful of when expanding your participant list.
When you start adding more stakeholders or subject matter experts, it’s good to increase the number of designers (or others with design sprint experience) to support with guiding people who’ve not done workshops like this before.
Run it in person
This sprint would’ve been extremely difficult to run remotely, would’ve felt much more rigid and we would’ve missed the pockets of great conversation that ripple across a room when people are together.
One of our subject matter experts travelled to Manchester from Devon and we were very grateful.
Plan your sessions and agenda out in detail, but be ready to adapt on the fly
Our agenda and timings were planned in detail and we made the timings for every activity visible to everyone. On day 2, after getting through more ideas than expected, it felt like the energy could drop if we did more sketching. We tweaked our afternoon agenda to finish the day with a dot voting exercise we originally planned to do asynchronously.
Send out pre-reads or homework
We knew we would not have time in our sprint to recap on what a design sprint is so to deal with this, we sent out a short one-page explainer document to all attendees and asked them to read ahead of the session.
One or two pages of pre-reads or homework can be good ways to get around session time constraints.
Set clear ground rules
This is good advice for any design sprint, but more important here. Some of our rules are:
keep to time: give everyone in the room accountability for arriving after breaks on time and wrapping up tasks when the timer runs out
no multitasking: full focus on the sprint in the sprint, use breaks for checking emails if required
Don’t feel you have to stick to a traditional design sprint
Design sprints don’t have to be 5 days long and not every activity has to be done ‘by the book’. If you have limited time, be really clear about what outcomes you can get to in the time and plan accordingly.
If you want more help with facilitating, have a look at the facilitation guide on the Experience Library.
What we learned overall
When we set out on this discovery, we wanted to find ways to help people who know they are dying and their families. We rely on doing 1-to-1 user research to gain a deep understanding into the problems that our customers face. In Funeralcare it helps us to learn about the complex emotions that people are experiencing when they need to arrange a funeral plan or funeral.
What was different about the ideation stage of our imminent need work was the variety and size of our design sprint. We learned that, done the right way, running a large design sprint meant we:
progressed our ideas and work much sooner than we would have otherwise
saved significant amounts of time and money by reducing the need for multiple individual meetings over months
introduced our wider team to design ways of working which, along with a wider focus on this, has led to more people wanting to work in this way
developed even stronger relationships with a wider range of our colleagues and teams, which we’re continuing to build on
When we put out the call for this big design sprint at short notice, we did not expect so many brilliant colleagues from different parts of the business to sign up. Everyone who was involved fully embraced the process and the ideas and outcomes are stronger as a result.
There is lots for us to work on in this space, but some ideas come with technical challenges. Our first small step was to create guidance content for people needing help with planning:
Whilst the team exploring it has been designer-heavy at times, we’ve considered the wider implications for our wider data and technology teams too. That means we’re talking more about digital sustainability more the specifically designing responsibly now.
What we prioritised
Our early conversations surfaced a lot of potential opportunities, as well as things that could block us doing them and many unknowns that need more investigation. We spent along time just figuring out where to even start.
We did several workshops alongside sustainability experts that helped identify some distinct needs that we felt we could meet as a group. These were things that we found holding us back from working more sustainably in our teams personally, as well as what we had seen or heard other organisations doing. We decided to:
create a written artefact to act as a reference point for what we wanted to achieve
collect data to benchmark our current position
create awareness and increase literacy of digital sustainability at Co-op
Each of these aims took a slightly different approach over the last 12 months:
Creating a written thing
We initially explored creating a ‘strategy’ for digital sustainability. As we talked, and learned from others, we continually returned to our aim of seeing actual change in how teams work, and questioned whether a strategy was the right approach.
The aspiration was to create something that:
could be a point of reference for teams to use, to enable them to start making changes in their own work
made our commitment public, so we are more likely to hold ourselves accountable to it
acted as a conversation starter with people who have not considered the topic
enabled us to collect feedback about what does and doesn’t make sense to teams as they read and try to use it
Our accessibility policy is a good example of something that has achieved similar goals. It is widely adopted across Co-op design teams, acting as a minimum expectation for our work. The policy is promoted and updated by our accessibility champions, who collectively run training to raise awareness and improve practice in the design and engineering team and beyond.
Inspired by the policy format, Marianne brought her content design expertise to creating a draft document that communicated potential opportunities for change. Whilst still a working draft (that isn’t public yet), the document now covers:
Why we have a digital sustainability policy
Things we can do to increase digital sustainability and reduce energy demand
Ways of working
Design, engineering and development practice
Supply chain
Hosting
Equipment
Data and storage
What we are already doing
Responsibility for digital sustainability
Awareness of the digital sustainability policy
Help with sustainability
How we will measure the success of the digital sustainability policy
Information and resources on digital sustainability
Benchmarking our websites
One thing that stalled progress early on was that we didn’t have any benchmark for how sustainable our current digital products or technology infrastructure was. It is still a work in progress, but we do now have a better idea of what data we do or don’t have, and who manages access to that data.
Co-op has multiple customer and colleague facing websites that total an average over 28 million hits per month, spread across a wide range of individual pages. Using Website carbon calculator we measured the carbon intensity for key pages across different businesses.
We calculated that 28 million hits on Co-op websites roughly equates to 75 tons CO2 equivalent a year.
More detailed performance data helped explain why different pages had different scores. There was a very strong correlation between standard performance metrics (page weight and speed) and the carbon intensity of each page.
At the time we collected this data:
www.coop.co.uk emitted 0.22g of CO2 equivalent every visit. The total page payload was 1.99mb, the largest Contentful paint took 1.6s
Whereas www.coop.co.uk/funeralcare emitted 0.55g of CO2 equivalent. The total page payload was 2.84mb, the largest Contentful paint took 5.5s.
In part this demonstrates the close link between sustainability and performance, as well as accessibility, usability, and cost etc. Sustainability is not just a moral obligation that works against our other priorities, done well it supports many of the other good practices we aim for.
Benchmarking our internal data storage and file sharing
Based on research and other advice, we knew our internal data storage and sharing tools would have a significant contribution to our digital footprint. At Co-op this mostly means Office 365. That includes SharePoint, Exchange (emails) and Onedrive. Fortunately we found that our ‘Domain Principal for Collaboration Services’ – the person who knows everything about our Office 365 usage had already deployed the Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365.
This, combined with other data we already knew as an organisation told us the following:
We currently have over 195 terabytes of data held in Microsoft servers
The energy to run our allocation of Office 365 servers has generated over 294 kg of CO2 equivalent in the last 12 months
The manufacture and shipping of those servers has generated over 46.5 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in the last 12 month
There are already plans to reduce the data we store by reducing the amount of time we retain data that people have deleted. Because its data people think is already deleted they likely won’t even notice the change, but it will have a significant impact on our storage needs.
Whilst imperfect, the combination of these two data sets enabled us to make what had previously been abstract conversation into more tangible impact. When you’re talking in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent based on your own data, it’s harder to ignore.
We still plan to explore the following tools to build out what we know using:
Alognside this we’ve also started conversations with the providers of other tools e.g. Miro to find out what they know around the energy intensity of their tools, and the data that we as an organisation store with them.
Raising awareness
This was probably the one we were least pro-active about. Whilst there’s been a committed small group of people that we’ve tried to galvanise, its not spread much beyond that core team. We have an open slack channel on all things #sustainability and a dedicated #sustainability-champions one. We’ve held community of practice style sessions where we’ve either developed and reviewed the policy or invited external speakers to share their knowledge and work.
Trying to free up people’s time can also be a challenge and we prioritised progressing things, and seeing change happen, over boosting attendance for now. There may come a time where the opposite approach is needed to continue seeing the desired change.
Work that is already happening
Much of this work has been pulling together existing threads of change that is already happening. For example, the surge in energy costs over the past 12 months meant it became a priority for teams to identify opportunities to save energy, and more of these had a worthwhile payback because now the potential cost of energy was greater than the time it would cost us to make the changes. For example:
By the end of 2023 all Co-op self-serve tills in stores will be powered down centrally overnight and then switched back on an hour before opening time. This is projected to save over 1.5 million kwh (290 tons CO2 equivalent) and over £500,000.
Decommissioning a large SharePoint site that was no longer in use is projected to save approximately 40,000 kwh and over £15,000 annually.
The engineering team for ‘Shared Digital Services’ have explored how they can make better use of their AWS infrastructure that supports their products. Initial experiments show a saving of £23 a day, or over £5000 by December 2023, they have not calculated the expected energy saving yet.
None of these examples have directly come from the creation of the policy but serve as reference points for the opportunities that exist across our teams when we pro-actively seek out ways to be more energy efficient and use our design and development skills to make changes.
What’s next
Sharing this work with our Digital, Technology and Data leadership team generated good conversation, questions and generally showed appetite from them for more, but the real change needs to happen within teams.
We had some feedback around whether a ‘policy’ was the right way to position the document we had created, but the response was overall positive. We’re hoping to move continue developing it and ultimately publish as some form of ‘guidelines’. Watch this space.
In the meantime, the main aim is to actually see change happen, teams taking initiative to reduce the energy consumption of their ways of working and the products they design, build and manage. We suspect this will be partly driven by the policy or guidelines that are sponsored by leadership, but equally (if not more so) through individual’s personal motivation. To boost this, we delivered a session as part of our internal Digital, Technology and Data team conference in June, and have planned community of practice sessions to help spread the word.
If you were weeks away from dying and wanted to arrange your funeral, new regulations might mean you would not be able to buy a funeral plan. This is because buying a funeral plan only a few weeks in advance can cost more than arranging the funeral after you die. The Funeralcare digital team want to help people in this situation, and we did so by interviewing people to learn about the complex needs associated with planning for a funeral with a terminal illness.
New regulations have changed the way people can buy funeral plans. People are now asked questions about their situation before they can buy one. One of these questions is, ‘do you have a terminal illness?’ This isn’t something funeral plan providers had to ask before. The reason this is asked now is because a pre-paid funeral plan could cost more than a funeral arranged in the next month or two. Asking if people have a terminal illness is meant to make sure they don’t pay more than they should for their funeral.
This affects hundreds of people a month
In November and December 2022, 405 people told us they had a terminal illness by answering the question in the funeral plan journey. We also heard that our call centre could be turning away people who want to buy a funeral plan but cannot, because they might have an imminent need.
Because a funeral plan isn’t appropriate for someone who is likely to die imminently, the Funeralcare design team did a discovery to see how we could help them by understanding what they needed. We wanted to make sure people in this position could still plan for their funeral, if that’s what they want to do.
We did a discovery to learn more about:
what happens when a client wanting to buy a funeral plan says they are terminally ill
what happens when someone wants to arrange a funeral or record their funeral wishes before they die
the difficulties we face having conversations with clients about how we can support with end-of-life planning, their will, power of attorney and other legal advice
User research with vulnerable people
Finding people to speak to in this position can be difficult, but those who say yes to taking part in the research tell us they do it because they want to help others. Our user researcher recruited people who have a terminal illness and people who are supporting those with one.
We did 20+ hours of interviews with:
2 terminally ill people
5 family or friends of people who are dying
2 people who work in end-of-life care
4 funeral arrangers
12 stakeholders across Co-op Funeralcare and Life Services
We also analysed hundreds of phone calls into our sales team. We surveyed more than 300 Funeralcare colleagues to find out more about their experiences. And we did an extensive competitor review to see what other funeral providers were doing in this space.
What we learned about people with this need
Planning for a funeral while the person is still alive is really hard. This is not a pragmatic, forward-planned purchase they can forget about once it’s done. This is a highly emotive experience for people and the mindset is very different from someone buying a pre-paid funeral plan.
When someone knows they’re dying, it’s not just them involved in the planning of their funeral. It can be a collection of family and friends, often with one person taking the lead and supporting them. Third parties can also be involved, such as hospice workers, charities and support groups.
Everyone has their own approach. Some want it sorted, some cannot bear to think about it. We found that the person who is dying and those caring for them often had different approaches.
Some were more passive and less willing to talk about what they want.
“We needed someone to tell him off and tell him to remove the burden from us.”
Others were more actively involved in discussing what they wanted.
“She’s got notes on her phone, of all the things she wants at the funeral. She’s always adding to it.”
Those who want it sorted know exactly what they want and plan it sometimes without speaking about it with family members. Some take longer to plan these details, maybe being inspired by a song on the radio or an item of clothing they’ve come across. They know they need to let family members know where to find things when they’ll need them.
Funeralcare colleagues always want to help
Research conversations with our Funeralcare colleagues highlighted they’re already helping people in this position plan their funeral on paper. They want to do whatever they can to help when someone comes into a funeral home. They do their best with what they have, and they do it well. The work we do next after this discovery will hopefully make this easier for them and for people who need this.
Listen to your user, however hard it might be to hear
To create the best services for Funeralcare, you must listen to your user. Even if it’s difficult. Even if their stories are hard to hear. Listening to them is never going to be harder than what they’re going through.
This project was approached with huge amounts of sensitivity and some bravery. We all had to face into these difficult questions and conversations and be comfortable talking about this topic for concentrated periods of time.
Look after each other
This discovery was challenging. The conversations we had with people with a terminal diagnosis, and their families can be difficult to be a part of. Witnessing their anticipatory grief was upsetting. We’ve also been affected by death individually in the team, so we were extra careful to check in with each other every day and allowed ourselves a pass out if it got too much.
What we did next
Next, we did a design sprint. We got key stakeholders and Funeralcare colleagues working together to find ways we can help our colleagues help people with an imminent need for a funeral. Look out for our next blog post on how working collaboratively helped us to save hours of individual meeting time, get to the best ideas faster and create universal support progressing the work further.
Our user researcher, Jamie Kane, gave a talk about the research we did at a recent Content Teatime, watch the recording of that event, which features 5 talks all about designing for death, dying and bereavement.
If you’ve been affected by anything in this blog post, you can visit the bereavement support pages on the Funeralcare website or go visit the Marie Curie website for more advice and information.
Our Colleague Products team designs technology that transforms how our food stores operate. We’ve always designed closely with our store colleagues, doing in-person research in the store environment to learn about their needs and to test future designs.
During the pandemic we adapted our methods of remote research to maximise what we could learn, but as soon as it was possible, we went back into stores. Research in-person and on-site is not always the most easy, convenient or cheap option – so why did we return to it?
In this blog post, our Colleague Products researchers share innovative methods for researching in the environment you are designing for – which is also known as contextual research. Our examples show the benefits of this kind of research and the results for our stores.
Understanding what stores need
What works in one kind of store, may be a disaster in another. It can be the difference between an instore innovation saving time, money or energy demand, and making things worse for our colleagues who are working so hard to get things right.
Stores can be large or small, have low or high sales, and include different checkout formations. We also need to consider that our colleagues interact with shelves, trolleys, products, and move around the store.
Colleagues face obstacles including:
needing to print from an office upstairs which is a big pain point and takes up valuable time
different kinds of goods lifts which can completely change how a store handles a delivery
the layout of the checkout area can make it difficult to see when a customer needs help
Diagram of store layout showing that it’s hard to see customers queuing behind shelves.
We’ve developed the design principle that we should always ‘design for distraction’ due to our research in stores. When we did research for SmartGap and News and Mags, we observed how colleagues had to stop the task to help customers or colleagues. We now know it’s vital colleagues can pick up where they left off. Designing so that we reduce cognitive load (how much our colleagues need to think about at once), also helps when they are juggling tasks.
Meeting a wider range of colleagues on their terms
Remote research allows us to speak to people we cannot visit because of location, but we’ve learned that being instore means we speak to a wider variety of users. Some colleagues cannot always respond to a remote call or survey. They may be new, work part-time, or not have time to read all the communications. Some colleagues are also less confident with technology, and it’s these colleagues we really need to learn from.
Visiting colleagues instore can help them feel at ease too. Being in an environment where colleagues are comfortable when we’re asking questions and observing actions can help them feel more in control.
Observing what people do, not what they say they do
The main benefit of visiting stores is that we get more value from these research sessions.
We can ask colleagues what they would do in an interview, but when we can see them in action, we can see what they really do. This includes things like:
micro pain points that take extra time
things that they may not think are important when we ask them
shortcuts that they develop over time and are second nature
These coping mechanisms are valuable for us to know about. In one case, a manager had made a ‘cheat sheet’ explaining how to read a report, which is proof it needed simplifying.
Making our research as realistic as possible
Before taking a Date Code design prototype into stores for testing, we created fake products by printing out product photos and sticking them to cardboard. This meant that colleagues could interact with products, and the sell-by-dates that matched the prototype.
During usability sessions for a till prototype, we created a more realistic experience by making ‘beep’ noises when the colleague mimed scanning a product. This realism is useful for triggering colleague memories and conversation.
Using ‘Wizard of Oz’ testing – a method of testing a system that does not yet exist
Last year we used a version of the ‘Wizard of Oz‘ testing method during a 2 week pilot in a store. One of the goals of the pilot was to understand whether automated alerts about tasks via headsets and handheld devices would work in a store environment.
We manually sent alerts while colleagues were carrying out their usual store tasks and observed if, how and when they acted on them. This helped colleagues to understand the concept. It also gave us a first-hand view of how alerts might have an impact on colleagues and their work.
Getting colleagues involved with prototyping and testing
We can use physical research methods, such as card sorts, paper prototypes, or process walkthroughs with prototype devices. We also do co-design sessions with colleagues, so that they can get creative with paper and pens to create their own ideal interface. All of this is much harder to facilitate remotely, especially if the colleague is not confident using technology or does not have the right tools.
Usability testing is about more than just the interface design. When we were testing a new app on the store tablet in person, we immediately realised that some colleagues were holding it in portrait mode. This caused issues with the layout of content because colleagues did not realise that some information was hidden below what they could see on the screen. We would not have known this from data alone, or from remote testing.
Building empathy for real people, not users
Research in-person is great for getting your whole team involved with research. Our team say it ‘brings it all to life’. It helps show the importance of what we’re doing and helps everyone understand how everything fits together. The concept of ‘users’ can seem impersonal. Research in-person helps to build real empathy for the challenges our colleagues face.
If you ever have the opportunity to do or observe research in-person – we’d highly recommend it. You’ll always understand more, and your products and services will be better because of it.
Rachel Hand and Maisie Platts
Find out more about user research at Co-op and our research community of practice from Rachel Hand, Lead User Researcher.
We have some people in our department who are experienced speakers, happy to appear at public meetups and conferences. But we know there are lots more interesting stories to hear from other people. We wanted to encourage new voices and less experienced speakers to come forwards, but didn’t know how willing people would be.
Understanding the barriers to public speaking
We put out a call for speakers, making it clear we wanted to hear from everyone who might be interested. We offered coaching, feedback, or just an initial chat about ideas – whatever would help people feel confident to get started. Through this, we learned about a range of things that were on people’s minds:
some hadn’t done any public speaking before, and weren’t sure how to structure a talk or how they’d cope with nerves
it had been years since some people had spoken in person, and this seemed more daunting than the video calls they’d become used to
others were happy to talk in front of people they knew, or in communities that were encouraging – but weren’t sure how relatable their talk would be for a wider range of backgrounds
A common theme became clear: they all had fantastic stories to share and didn’t need much beyond a little assurance that people would want to hear them. We put together a varied agenda where all the talks were really well attended. On the day, the quality of the talks (and their slides!) was all really impressive.
A positive experience for our speakers
Our colleagues who’d put themselves forwards for talks told us the experience of talking in the supportive environment of an internal conference built their confidence for doing it again.
While it wasn’t the first time I spoke in front of a large-ish group of people, it’s the first time I presented my own content, not just product-related or business material. So there was an extra layer of feeling exposed and judged on a topic I feel very strongly about. I talk about anxiety and repurposing product design techniques to mitigate its effect and build better products and services. So you can imagine my, well, anxiety putting myself out there!
The experience of the conference gave me a lot of confidence to pitch this externally in a way that I never thought possible before. I’ve already got an external event lined up in a few weeks!
I was grateful to be given an opportunity to speak, especially with my name place alongside colleagues whose confidence and delivery I hugely admire. This is the first time I’ve delivered a talk to a large group of people and the warm support from colleagues before, during and after the conference has given me the confidence and appetite to do it again, and to a wider audience.
James Martin, ‘Bridging the gap between designers and developers’
Encouraging colleagues to think about public speaking – lightning talks
We carried this idea of encouraging speakers into the conference itself, by running a session on how to do a lightning talk.
A lightning talk, just a few minutes long, is a great way to start public speaking because:
there’s no need to plan and remember a long script
it’s over quickly so can be less daunting
they’re more informal than longer talks
Lightning talks do have their own challenges: with such a small amount of time to get to the point, you need to be really clear on what you want to get across, and be ruthless about leaving out lots of potentially interesting detail and asides.
People are interested in your talk
One of the biggest barriers to giving a talk, even a short lightning one, is accepting that people are interested in what you have to talk about.
“Come learn from me, I am an expert in this thing” is a daunting and difficult way to approach a talk. And often, advice from experts is not all that useful – sometimes when a world-class authority talks, listeners can be thinking “run multiple companies, decades researching this topic, wrote a book about it … of course they can do this stuff, don’t know if I can”
Instead, think about: “I thought this looked difficult but maybe useful, here’s how I found a way to put it into practice and here’s how a surprisingly small amount of work really helped my team and organisation. I’d like to learn more, next I’ll look at…”
This second approach:
is believable (you’re not trying to claim you’re an expert in anything)
is relatable and useful for the audience
invites the audience to come and learn with you
We were extra impressed with the bravery of the group of attendees for this session: they could have safely stayed listening to someone else talk in the ground floor sessions, but instead they ventured up 13 floors to discuss putting themselves in front of an audience. Taking that step itself showed they’re passionate about the topics they want to share, and we’ll look forward to seeing them talk at our future conferences.
We’ve been working remotely in Co-op Digital Technology and Data since March 2020. Since then we’ve seen new teams form, departments merge and new people have joined us. We’ve also been figuring out how to navigate a new world of hybrid working. Lots of things are working well, but colleagues were feeding back that they missed the serendipitous conversations in the kitchen and the opportunities to stumble upon other teams and see what they are working on.
An experiment to help us learn
Lots of people were on board with the idea of running an internal conference in principle, but as we got into the details we started to come across stumbling blocks. Would we run the event in person, virtually or hybrid? How would colleagues feel about gathering in large groups after spending years working remotely? How many colleagues would want to give a talk? How much would it cost? An expensive conference felt risky, so we decided to apply our mindset of experimentation.
Could we create a ‘lean’, low-budget conference to mitigate the risks and learn how to bring distributed teams together in a post-pandemic world?
Choosing the right location
There are lots expensive ways to do a fancy conference, involving lots of time and planning. But we were trying to mitigate risk, so we gave ourselves lots of limitations. We decided to run the conference on as close to zero a budget as possible, and to do it before the end of the year.
We used our office, 1 Angel Square as the location. It’s a stunning building and felt like a ‘home from home’ after years of working remotely. However, it didn’t have a big enough space to host everyone at the same time – so we split the conference across 3 days. This meant that we didn’t need such large spaces and it also allowed colleagues to join on the days which fitted with their schedules, which might involve childcare or different working patterns.
We also got creative and repurposed areas in the building like the Foodology hub, where our team designs and tests new Co-op products. We opened floors we no longer use and turned them into temporary auditoriums with big screens.
Making it inclusive and accessible
Coming into the office in person in a large group wasn’t for everyone. Whether it was due to other commitments, living far away or not feeling comfortable to sit in a large room full of people, we still wanted everyone to feel included.
We weren’t able to make all of our sessions hybrid, but where we could we streamed the sessions and held virtual breakout rooms in place of in-person activities. For those who couldn’t attend on the day we recorded these sessions. We trialled using live captions to help colleagues with hearing difficulties so they could participate more fully.
Designing a thoughtful schedule
Since we were running the conference as an experiment, we wanted to be careful about making good use of our colleagues’ time. While we might not have to spend money on a venue, asking our whole department to take time out is quite an investment, so it was vital to make sure it was worthwhile.
In the morning we had our All Hands, which was repeated on each day. This was time for colleagues to reconnect with each other and with the Co-op purpose. The sessions were designed to feel useful and give our colleagues a chance to greet old friends and make new connections. They were also interactive to get the most of being face to face.
In the afternoon our colleagues led talks and workshops. It was like being at a TEDx event, with talks on a variety of topics from reflective practice to risk-storming the Deathstar. Leaders encouraged people to clear their diaries and make space, but we also streamed and recorded the sessions where we could so that everyone had a chance to join.
What we learned from our conference experiment
Running a multi-track, 3-day event across multiple floors of large building wasn’t easy. A team of helpers, connected through an open chat channel, kept everything running smoothly. Each conference space had an assigned helper to check the tech worked so that speakers could feel calm and prepared before going on stage.
Throughout the conference we captured feedback using QR codes scanned on phones for quick in the moment praise, thoughts and improvements. We held lots of retrospective afterwards – one for the organisers and one for the speakers and helpers.
Our feedback told us:
the structure of the conference (schedule, timings and venue) worked really well
colleagues would like more sessions to learn about what other teams and disciplines do
sometimes we had too many sessions at once – so we’ll look to have fewer sessions running in parallel and we’ll consider having tracks or themes.
the next one should still be in person, but to have more live streamed and recorded sessions
everyone would love to have another conference – at least once a year but ideally twice
We’re collating this into a book of lessons to remember and experiments we’d love to try next time.
The Co-op Digital blog was set up almost 7 years ago, alongside the digital arm of the Co-op. Since then we’ve matured. We’ve changed our name internally several times, and we now sit as part of the Digital Technology and Data function. But ultimately, we still do the same thing: work with the wider business to help create value for Co-op by focusing on the needs of our customers, members, colleagues and communities.
Over that time, the frequency of blog posts has changed and the tone of voice has evolved, but the blog is still an important platform for the team to work in the open. This post is about why working in the open is as important to us now as it was then.
Showing, not telling
Working in the open is not about ‘big reveals’ or PR-style spin.
It’s about communicating in short, frequent updates. It’s about accepting that things will not always go to plan, and being comfortable about acknowledging that.
If you’re not used to working in this way, it’s scary. It can be terrifying for lots of reasons and the ones we hear a lot are:
What if our competitor sees our open working and steals our ideas?
Will I look incompetent if I admit that something didn’t go to plan?
I don’t have time to write about the work – I’m too busy doing the work.
They’re common worries but they come from the idea that working in the open means telling everyone every single detail. There are different levels of being open though, and working openly isn’t about sharing commercially sensitive stuff, talking about daft mistakes or churning out reams of detail for the sake of it.
This post explains 5 reasons why it’s a good idea to work in the open.
1. It helps us own our own narrative
It’s important to have control over telling our own story. Proactively talking a little bit and regularly about the work we’re doing increases the chances of our reputation being one we can be proud of. We can help to create and influence our own reputation by sharing what we are, and what we know. The more we do that, the better our reputation becomes. It should be based on the work we do and the culture we build along the way. We are best positioned to talk about both.
It is human nature to fill in gaps in narratives. Silence from a team leaves it at the mercy of someone else’s assumptions and although this is not malicious (it’s often subconscious), it’s dangerous because assumptions can quickly become the ‘truth’ if we’re not told otherwise.
In other words, the more we show people, the less they have to guess.
Across various platforms including the Co-op Digital blog, we’ve been careful not to leave gaps in our story that assumptions could fill. Co-op is a gigantic, well-established, traditional business; rightly or wrongly, with each of those adjectives comes a set of assumptions. Co-op Digital was established to help Co-op thrive in the internet era so it was extra important that we began to talk about this new chapter to show everyone how we were moving forward.
2. It helps attract talent
Talking openly about our work and its challenges on the blog, on Twitter and at events has helped Co-op build a reputation as a good place for design, product and delivery people to work on things that matter.
The blog has played a huge part in recruitment: it’s helped us show what we’re doing and what we’re thinking right now which distances us from the typical recruitment site which might include rose-tinted representations of what working here is like. Our culture can be inferred from our blog posts and they’ve given potential employees a good indication of what it’s like to be part of the team – more so than a job advert ever could.
Tweet from our former Head of Experience Strategy and Design, Katherine.Message from Lead front-end engineer, Phil, on Slack.Tweet from our former software engineer, Caroline Hatwell.
3. It helps us build trust
Working in the open – particularly on the blog – has helped us build trust between ourselves and our colleagues, stakeholders, community and customers. It has meant we’ve been able to show our work while it is in progress, including the things we’re finding difficult and the things that haven’t gone to plan. This authenticity has gone a long way towards building trust because, in contrast, many companies only publish slick, polished PR which can feel a bit too shiny to be an honest reflection of what’s happening.
It’s reassuring to see the more human side of an organisation. People tend to respect those who are humble, who show they are thinking, admit they don’t know everything, but are committed to learning.
“In the workplace, if there is no vulnerability, there’s no creativity. If there’s no tolerance for failure, there’s no innovation…”
4. It helps create a community
Blogging and tweeting have helped us find people and teams who are working on similar things in other organisations. It has also helped people from other organisations find us too. For example, Jamie Kane published a post about how a voice user interface could help our colleagues in Funeralcare, and user researcher Mirabai asked us for advice – she was looking at the user experience of registering a death on a council’s website.
Twitter conversation between an external user researcher, Mirabai and Co-op user researcher, Jamie.
When Jamie and Mirabai spoke they learnt from each other – the conversation was mutually beneficial. However, talking about a subject openly makes us visible and it positions us as experts by default and communities build around this. (We’ve spoken about our Funeralcare work here). This has happened with many posts but memorably on accessibility, design systems, and our mental health meet-ups.
5. It makes governance easier
Show and tells, weeknotes, and blog posts are all ways of working in the open but depending on the situation, we don’t always refer to the methods in those terms. However, we do always look for opportunities to get our work (and our plans for what’s next) under the noses of people with expertise in other parts of Co-op, beyond our immediate team. We’ve had some success but this one is dependent on creating the conditions where these become the right touch points for decision makers. It takes time and we constantly work on this.
In theory though – and we’ve seen this to varying degrees – working in the open can help with governance because:
Stakeholders have regular opportunities to informally feed back any concerns and flag things that may become a problem later on. It means we are far less likely to spend too much time or money pursuing something that isn’t viable.
A more collaborative approach increases empathy and understanding between us and our stakeholders. Show and tells, weeknotes and blog posts help us involve them from the start and earn their trust. Working in this way means governance can be less arduous and lighter-touch than it might be if our siloed team built something and submitted it to a formal reporting process for a panel of gatekeepers to run checks on something they haven’t seen before.
👑 Long live our blog
I recently left Co-op, but the team knows the value of the blog and is determined that it will continue. The keys to the blog will sit with Head of Content Hannah Horton for now and you can read my blogging guidance to find out more about the process.
Originally, this piece of work was about making sure we included all the components we knew our community needed. But as we got further into the research, we found our community needed guidance on aspects we hadn’t considered.
In the Co-op Customer Products team, we value having the autonomy to be flexible and divert from a plan when we need to. So, with the aim of meeting newly-discovered user needs, we pivoted our work.
A recap: the importance of familiarity in design
Co-op has many business areas and many products and services within them. In most, there’ll be at least one form that, for example, asks a customer for personal details to register for something, or asks for a customer’s payment details so they can buy something. Although our business areas are diverse, it’s important that all of them use a common design language to create familiarity. This means that interactions work in the same way in each service and each one feels like it belongs to Co-op. This helps us build trust with our users.
Starting with research
As always, we started with research. This involved one-to-one conversations with colleagues from a wide range of teams and disciplines to better understand their needs. The conversations helped shape our focus and we ended up with a list of form components that our community needed. Our goal was to design, build and release these components into the Experience Library.
New information = new direction
However, during the conversations, a new theme emerged around the structure and layout of forms.
Although our original research didn’t highlight this as an area of need, feedback from newer members of the community made it clear that this was important but there was ambiguity.
Some of the questions they asked included:
What spacing should I use between field sets, labels and buttons?
Is it better to use single or double columns for laying out forms?
Where should I position buttons?
How should I show optional or required fields?
We realised our community needed more than form components and guidance on when and how to use forms – it needed guidance on designing single or multi-page forms from the ground up.
Getting a deeper understanding of the problem
The outcome we were aiming for was for all design colleagues to be comfortable and confident setting up forms for the products and services they look after. So we needed to understand the practices that already existed, and also what change was needed.
Here are 4 things we did to deepen our understanding.
1. Carried out user research
We facilitated conversations with newer members of the design community. We asked questions like:
When designing a form, what did you feel unsure about?
What guidance did you expect to find in the Experience Library for designing a form?
Is there anything else you feel would have helped you in designing a form?
These open questions helped us understand which areas needed clear guidance.
2. Reviewed Co-op forms
When we started the forms work, we reviewed forms across Co-op products and services. We went back to the analysis we did but this time we focused on layout and structure and therefore the usability rather than individual components.
This helped identify variations in form design across Co-op.
3. Analysed other design systems
We looked at the guidance other design systems had on form design. An important take-away was how some design systems used visuals to explain guidance.
4. Revisited best practice
We revisited forms specialists Caroline Jarrett and Adam Silver’s work on forms and considered how it applies to our form design at Co-op.
Designing the ‘Form design’ page
Content designers and interaction designers worked together to define the topics that our guidance should cover. We had some difficult conversations to help us understand different takes on the same topic and often challenged each other’s view. Referring back to the insights allowed the team to have those difficult conversations. We reflected on different perspectives and continually iterated on the content. Through this process we were able to define our stance on things like button positioning. Once we were aligned, we added detail and referenced the insights we’d found in the research.
We also found the need to visualise some of our guidance. For this, we defined a visual language that can be used on diagrams in the future.
We shared early versions of the page with people from the Design, Product and Engineering communities to review. We value different perspectives, and want others to contribute to our work. By designing in the open, our community sees our approach, which helps build trust. Showing them the depth of our process encourages buy-in and the early feedback in the reviews was positive.
A ‘people-first’ design system
Our new Form design page wouldn’t exist without the feedback from our community. We designed it for them, based on conversations we had with them. Delivering guidance that meets their needs shows that we’re listening, we’re collaborative and this builds trust with our colleagues. Our work is less about a page in a design system, and more about the people that use it. We’ll keep listening and iterate when we need to. Like the rest of the Experience Library, this page will evolve with our community’s needs.
The Customer Experience (CX) team has been working with our Co-op Food colleagues to look at how we can improve customer service in our stores. When the CX team help the wider Co-op business solve problems, our process usually involves prototyping. Because we often work in the digital space, our prototypes are often on a screen too.
This challenge however focuses on in-person experiences in our stores. So, for this piece of work, testing in a physical space and in a more tangible way felt more appropriate.
Before trialling in a store, we wanted to test our ideas in a low-risk environment where we wouldn’t be in the way of day-to-day store life but where we could still involve colleagues who bring other expert knowledge.
We used a ‘desktop walkthrough’ method to simulate the in-store experiences.
We are writing this post to share:
why we chose the desktop walkthrough method as a prototyping tool
how we used it to get a better understanding of our trial logistics
what we learnt about using a less familiar method
Exploring the problem with a team of experts
To discover how we can improve customer service in store, we needed to understand the current customer experience and identify pain points.
We formed a small team of colleagues across Food Operations, Insight and Research, and store managers to help us focus on the right things. Each discipline has its own perspective and involving the right people means we’re more likely to focus on the right things.
Defining the problem and prioritising 1 concept to tackle
Based on our research, we identified 3 areas we could explore that would help our customers receive (and our colleagues to be able to provide) better service. They were:
Technology – how might we use new and existing technology to make improvements across different parts of the customer journey?
People – how might we help our colleagues to prioritise service through training and recognition?
Insight – how might we make better use of the insight we have on our customers, colleagues and stores to make improvements to customer service?
We chose to explore the ideas focused on people because we identified the most amount of value, opportunity and feasibility here. We specifically wanted to look at how we might recognise colleagues who were great ‘customer service advocates’ in stores.
We defined our hypothesis and used it to develop a plan for our trial in a real store. We established the basics of good customer service, and we defined the role of a customer service advocate.
Choosing an inclusive and lightweight way to test
To choose the right prototyping method for the scenario, we revisited what we wanted to learn. Our learning objectives were to:
get a shared understanding about the end-to-end customer experience
understand the important interactions between colleague and customer journeys
identify other problem areas so we can address them
We decided to try a desktop walkthrough because:
It brings experts from different areas together, in one room, without distraction so we could explain why we had arranged the walkthrough and what we planned to do afterwards in real stores. Each person has a unique perspective and can raise challenges the rest of the group wouldn’t necessarily consider.
We could figure out our next steps without getting in the way of or taking time away from in-store colleagues.
We had a hunch it might help us realise things relating to the physical space we otherwise likely wouldn’t have with a different method. For example, shelving and fixtures tend to be tall and make it difficult for colleagues to see each other providing good service.
The set-up
As the name implies, the walkthrough takes place at a desk. The Format team shared a generic store floor plan which we printed out and laid on the desk. Then we added 3D card shelving, tills and self-checkouts on top of the paper layout to recreate a mini-scale, realistic-as-possible store. We used figurines to represent colleagues and customers.
We added cardboard tills, self-checkouts and shelving on the floor plan.
Walking through scenarios
We chose to walk through common scenarios for store colleagues. For example:
opening the store
navigating around the store at the times when there are fewer colleagues on the shop floor
operational tasks such as unloading deliveries or scanning gaps on the shelves – times where a colleague is less available to directly help customers
customer interaction trade-off scenarios like helping a customer to find an item while being asked over headset to pack a Deliveroo order
We grouped customer and colleague figurines around the floor plan as we walked through scenarios.
We also took note of real colleagues’ shifts, lunch breaks and list of tasks too so we could get an idea of how busy the space would be. Weaving this into our walkthrough brought an additional layer of understanding for the people in the room.
A desktop walkthrough meant we got a bird’s eye view of colleagues moving through our model store for the duration of their shift. It also helped us see where, when or why colleagues interact with customers.
Customer team member number 3 is in the stockroom dealing with a delivery here
Building value for our CX team and the wider community
Our desktop walkthrough was a quick, cheap way to prepare for an in-store trial. Bringing our ideas to life in this way meant we picked up on things that might not work in stores and we could adapt our concepts without wasting time or money. A lot of this was down to 2 ex-store managers who joined us for the walkthrough – their input was invaluable. Their first-hand experience of working in – and running – stores meant they could sense-check our assumptions which made the scenarios we walked through far more realistic. We made changes to our experiment plan based on their insight and we believe this contributed to the success of our first store trial.
Since our desktop prototype we have progressed to trialling our customer service advocate concept in stores and continue to learn and adapt.
