Co-op first started an e-commerce service in 2019 and rolled out delivery nationwide during the pandemic. Ever since, we’ve been trying to find out more about why people use this service. In 2023 the Food customer experience team started to focus on quick commerce.
Quick commerce means something different to each customer. Our insights told us that some customers think delivery within one day is quick. Expectations in city areas can be much faster than that and closer to 2 hours.
When we carried out our user research, translating our findings into guiding principles helped us to explain these needs to colleagues. We could then build and design the customer experience using these principles.
Research focus and approach
Speaking to users regularly has given us a strong understanding of their motivations and expectations around rapid delivery services. We have also learned about how behaviour differs depending on whether people are doing a big shop or looking for products urgently.
All the research was remote, which allowed us to speak to customers from across the country. We did comparison studies, gathering feedback on prototypes and co-creating journeys with participants. This allowed us to understand more about how rapid grocery delivery services fit into our customer’s lives.
Why we created guiding principles
After analysing the research observations, it became clear that our usual approach to communicating the findings would not achieve our goals. Summarising the key insights would help us to understand what we’d heard, but not how to apply these user needs to the redesign of Co-op Food’s online experience.
Colleagues recognise the importance of user research, but it is sometimes hard to know how to apply the insights to our day-to-day work. It was important to think about how to make it easier for everyone to digest what we’d heard in research and think about how it impacts our roles.
It’s also easy for Miro boards and presentations of research findings to get forgotten about when we are often working remotely.
The research findings were going to be vital for setting direction across the team, so we created a set of ‘guiding principles’ to communicate our findings.
How guiding principles work
The principles:
- have brought the team together around a shared problem
- are actionable
- are memorable and easily referenced
Guiding principles felt appropriate because they relate to different types of customers, across different shopping situations. They are different to traditional personas which focus on a single group of people and are not always flexible across different situations.
“I think you’ve highlighted a real problem in the research space, creating TANGIBLE outputs”
Suhail Hussain, Lead Interaction Designer
How we use the guiding principles
Lead Interaction Designer, Sam Sheriston, designed a set of posters to illustrate the guiding principles. We printed some and put them up in our team area and regularly pin them to Miro boards to keep them in mind.
The team are using the guiding principles in different ways. Our:
- designers use them to inform ideation sessions and the development of new digital experiences
- engineering leaders use them to communicate about the level of service we want to achieve
We also use them alongside data and testing to make sure we’re doing the right thing and used them to present work to the Co-op board.
“The design principle ‘seconds count’ was just referenced in the huddle, totally unprompted and not even part of a customer products update. That is success! Influencing people’s day-to-day language takes time but is so powerful.”
Elise Nollent, Principal Delivery Manager
How guiding principles are helping our customers
The guiding principle ‘be upfront’ influenced us to explain additional charges to the customer in a clear way.
When we thought about what ‘tell me how I could benefit’ means we added more content at the start of the journey, explaining why we need the customer’s postcode, and what the service is.
The principle ‘don’t distract me’ guided us throughout the design of the customer’s journey. We made sure we kept the customers main task in mind and focused on helping them to get from the start to the finish in efficient time.
What we learned
Guiding principles can be a great way of keeping user needs front of mind. They’re a visual way of representing what we’ve heard in research and keeping everyone on track.
It’s not easy to leave out the details of our findings when we’ve spoken to so many customers and found out so many new things. It is tempting to want to say more, but keeping these principles short and snappy has had a huge impact on the focus.
The principles are memorable, easy to remember and have become a natural way for us to talk about our customer’s needs. It’s also easier for designers to reference the guiding principles throughout their work.
How you could use the guiding principles:
If you work within Co-op’s Food business, you could think about how the guiding principles apply to your area. They’re relevant to all stages of the customer experience.
If you’re a researcher or designer, how could you communicate your research findings in a more compelling way? How might you ensure that they are actionable and help colleagues to make decisions that benefit your end-users?
The app and offers team have already taken inspiration and created a set of principles for designing interactive games for Co-op customers.
Vicki Riley, Principal User Researcher
With special thanks to Sam Sheriston, Lead Designer, for designing the posters