We’ve made live our Co-op Finder Alpha. Have a look https://alpha.coop.co.uk/finder.
If you’ve ever used our old store locator, you’ll see there are lots of things that aren’t in the new one. There’s a reason for that. We don’t know whether it was useful or not, in fact there’s a lot we don’t know.
We’ll use our Co-op Finder Alpha to learn more.
We do know a lot of people choose to come to our website to use our store locator to see whether we are open, usually around those times when opening hours in general are not obvious, like Sunday evenings and national holidays.
We also know that the next most common thing customers need, is to know where the nearest Co-op is to a specific location.
We’ve kept a few obvious elements, like telephone numbers and links to get directions, but other than that we’ve removed anything that we don’t have an evidenced user need for.
There are two opportunities for users to provide feedback on the experience itself and whether the information is correct, through this and further user research we will understand better what needs to be there.
We’ve already learnt a lot and have some solid improvements in the pipeline that we’ll make live shortly.
Our show & tell is part of the coop.co.uk session every Wednesday, 10th Floor, 10.15-10.45 – all colleagues and Council members welcome.
Please let us know what you think.
Ben Rieveley
Product Manager
There is a project around store calls regarding opening hours in the listen act and fix programme and I assume you are linked in here?
It needs to have both “widen search area” and “look for other coops” (link to Cooperatives UK’s directory, perhaps) options, especially when there’s no/few group stores.
Hi MJ. Thanks for the comments, we’ve had similar feedback and are looking at improving the usability of the map. We have other society food stores in the finder, as most shoppers don’t make the distinction.
I think maybe you only have CRTG food stores in the finder, not all co-op societies?
True. We should include all, do you know a reliable data source / or whether Co-ops UK have an API/service?
I’m not sure. I suspect a request from you may get a more positive answer than mine did. If nothing else, at least there’s now data dumps at http://www.uk.coop/resources/open-data-csv but I don’t know how often they are updated.
There are 2 co-op shops within a mile of my location/liverpool area, neither was listed listed when I typed in Liverpool and the site said it couldn’t recognise my location even though it’s switched on on my phone settings.
Thanks Jackie, really helpful. We are finding that our data needs a big sort out.
I’d like to be able to find just large stores with a wider range of products
Id also like to be able to use Google Maps and just type in Co-op to get accurate information on holiday opening times etc. Please keep this up to date.
This would not open tried a few times.