Co-op Experience

Taking a content design approach to how AI could help our colleagues

Co-op
A colleague in a Co-op store is standing in the aisle of a store holding a small handheld device. She is inputting information into the handheld device. There are jars of jam and containers of coffee on the shelves behind her.


Our ‘How do I’ (HDI) website was created by content designers pair-writing with store and operational colleagues. The aim was to provide operational policy information, in a way that was easy to understand, in a busy store environment.

Store colleagues rely on ‘How Do I’ to comply with legal regulations and maintain high standards of customer service. Colleagues tell us it’s useful, but difficult to find some information quickly. Our Content Design and Data Science teams worked together to test how using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and a large language model (LLM) could help.

It proved to be a great opportunity to learn from how content designers can work with teams who want to make the most of AI capability.

Taking a content design approach

As a Content Design team at Co-op, we create content that is evidence-based, user-focussed, and based on shared standards to meet our commercial goals. We want to keep these content design principles at the centre of our approach to AI generated content.

The teams designed a process that combined a Co-op built AI and a Microsoft LLM. It means that when a user enters a query, a Co-op built AI system looks at a copy of our ‘How do I’ website and finds the information that is most likely to be relevant. It takes this data and the original question, and feeds it all to a Microsoft LLM. The LLM then generates a response and passes it back to the user as an answer.

How the AI works

There are a number of illustrations to show a process of how the AI works in steps. Illustration 1: hands using a phone: Colleague types a question into AI HDI Illustration 2: a screen with a magnifying glass and options: AI search engine looks up relevant information. from HDI. Keyword and semantic search. Passes the question and relevant info to LLM Illustration 3: Letters LLM in a file: LLM generates a response and sends it back to the AI Illustration 4: Mobile showing a list :Answer is provided to colleague

All of the content on the ‘How Do I’ (HDI) website was created and designed according to content design principles. As a result of the way LLMs work, without content design expertise, LLMs generate new content that is not subject to the same rigorous user-focussed design processes.

We needed to test how the AI was working to make sure it does not give misleading, unclear or inaccurate information. We analysed search data and worked with colleagues to identify the common queries they search for. This helped us to build an extensive list of test questions covering a wide range of operational, legal and safety related themes.

Testing and analysing the AI responses

When we tested the AI system with questions, we used the language our colleagues used. We asked simple questions and complex questions. We included spelling mistakes and abbreviations, then we analysed the AI system responses.

We took a content design approach and used our content guidelines to assess the responses. Validating the accuracy of responses included fact checking against the original ‘How Do I’ content to understand whether the AI had missed or misinterpreted anything.

We used this analysis to create a number of recommendations for how to improve the content of the AI responses.

Accuracy

Almost all the AI system responses provided information that was relevant to the question. But analysis showed it sometimes gave incorrect, incomplete or potentially misleading information. ‘How do I’ contains a lot of safety guidance, so to avoid risk for our colleagues, customers and business, we needed to make sure that any responses are always 100% accurate.

Accessibility

The initial AI system responses were hard to read because they were stripped of their original content design formatting and layout. Some of the responses also used language that sounded conversational, but added a lot of unnecessary words. LLMs tend towards conversational responses, which can result in content that is not accessible. It does not always get the user to the information they need in the simplest way.

Language

The AI did not always understand some of our colleague vocabulary. For example, it struggled to understand the difference between ‘change’ meaning loose coins, and ‘change’ meaning to change something. It did not understand that ‘MyWork’ referred to a Co-op colleague app. This meant it sometimes could not give relevant answers to some of our questions.

Using content design to improve the AI

Our Content Design team is now working with our data science team to explore how we can improve the AI system’s responses. We’re aiming to improve its accuracy, the language the AI uses, and reduce unnecessary dialogue that distracts from the factual answers. We’re also exploring how we can improve the formatting and sequencing of the AI responses.

This collaborative approach is helping us to get the most out of the technology, and making sure it is delivering high quality, accessible content that meets our users needs.

Based on the content design recommendations, our data science team have made changes to instructions that alter parameters for the AI, which is also known as ‘prompt engineering’. This affects the way the AI system breaks down and reformats information. We’re experimenting with how much freedom the AI has to interpret the source material and we’re already seeing huge improvements to the accuracy, formatting and accessibility of the responses.

Impact of the innovation of this AI work

“The ‘How Do I’ project has been hugely innovative for the Co-op. Not only in the use of the cutting edge technology, but also in the close cross-business collaboration we needed to find new solutions to the interesting new problems associated with generative AI. We’ve worked closely with Joe Wheatley and the Customer Products team, as well as colleagues in our Software Development, Data Architecture and Store Operations teams. We’ve been able to combine skills, experience and knowledge from a wide range of business areas and backgrounds to build a pioneering new product designed with the needs of store colleagues at its core.”

Joe Wretham, Senior Data Scientist

The future of AI and content design

AI has so many possible applications and its been exciting to explore them. This test work has also shown the critical role content design has in making sure we are designing for our users. AI can create content that is appears to make sense and is natural sounding, but the content needs to help users understand what they need to do next, quickly and easily.

Content designers understand users and their needs. This means understanding their motivations, the challenges they face, their environment, and the language they use. The testing we’ve done with the ‘How do I’ AI system shows that AI cannot do this alone, but when AI is combined with content design expertise, there are much better outcomes for the user and for commercial goals.

The content design team at Co-op have been exploring how they can balance current content design responsibilities with exploring skills and new areas for development in AI.

Blog by Joe Wheatley

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Bringing teams closer together with a service jam

Co-op

Members of our design team came together to run a service jam for our design, product and delivery teams. The service jam brought people from different teams closer together, encouraged experimenting with varied design methodologies and sparked energy, creativity and cooperation.

Why we ran a service jam

We’ve been working hybrid for a while now with less in-person contact across our teams. We know that a great way to get to know people is by collaborating. We wanted to give everyone the opportunity to connect with people in the same physical space and work with colleagues they do not usually get to work with.

Planning the jam

Over the course of a few months, a core team of organisers met weekly to plan and discuss the service jam day.

We agreed that we wanted the jam to bring people closer together and spark creativity. We wanted the jam to be on a topic that was not connected to our day-to-day work. This year, Co-op has been supporting Barnardos, our charity partner, with initiatives aimed at improving the lives of young people. This felt like a good problem and theme to think about for the service jam, so we decided to explore new service ideas for young people.

We also organised:

  • a venue away from our usual working space
  • presentations from subject matter experts
  • a service jam logo and branded slidedeck
  • supplies – paper, cardboard, scissors, glue
  • catering

The jam’s structure

We had 7 teams of 7 people on the day and we mixed the groups to make sure that they had a mix of interaction, content, service, product and delivery skills in them.

To give the event structure, the jam followed the classic double diamond design process:

  • discover
  • define
  • develop
  • deliver

For the initial discover section, we invited speakers from Barnardos and Co-op’s Community team to share the challenges facing young people today and the initiatives they already have in place. This helped ground the design sprint and give context.

For each stage of the design process, the facilitators gave a short introduction of the aim, different approaches or techniques they could use, and then gave teams time to discuss and work through it.

How it went

Teams were really engaged with the day and there was a lot of fun and energy in the room. Although it was a serious theme that posed some difficult challenges, the service jam allowed people to explore different ideas and develop them in a creative way.

At the end of the day, each team presented their ideas back to the room. Ideas included a mentoring scheme where people could choose their mentor, a scheme to transform brownfield spaces, and a career development programme to share skills.

The presentations were brilliant and showcased the different skills we have across the wider team.

What we learned

At the end of the day we asked for feedback from attendees. The organisers also ran a retro afterwards to identify what went well, not so well and what we have learned.

We learned that:

  • we could have been clearer that the day was about bringing people together rather than creating deliverable solutions to the problem
  • a materials checklist would have made it easier to be more organised just before the day
  • our teams are so creative and positive and did not need much support during the activities
  • an on-screen visible timer for activities was helpful
  • we could have found a way for some of the facilitators to be more involved as participants

What next

The day was a huge success. It generated lots of energy, creativity and excitement for the whole design team. We’re now planning a new service jam challenge for the Co-op Digital Technology and Data Conference so that our wider Co-op colleagues can have the same experience.

Blog by Lynn Hagan, Lead UX Designer – with special thanks to Helen Lawson, Lead Content Designer, and Jack Fletcher, Lead Service Designer.

Core service jam team organisers: Jess Armson, Antonia Duffin, Jack Fletcher, Lynn Hagan, Suhail Hussain, Helen Lawson, Steph Parkinson, Matt Tyas

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Service jam at the Co-op conference (internal Co-op colleagues)

Using guiding principles to communicate user research findings on quick commerce 

Co-op

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
They’re on the wall in 1AS

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. 

The team now use slimmed down components in Figma files to back up rational on design decisions

 
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   

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How our accessibility champions are creating a ‘can do’ culture 

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Over the last 7 years we’ve done a lot to improve our understanding, awareness, and execution of digital accessibility at Co-op.

We set out to tackle 3 problems when we started this journey:

  1. Awareness: We’ve explained what digital accessibility is, why it’s important and how to do it properly.
  2. Process: We’ve made it easier for our teams to put accessibility at the centre of every decision when creating products, services, and communications.
  3. Communication: We’ve made sure people are talking about accessibility across Co-op, not just in the digital space.

There’s been one constant in all our work – a group of passionate people committed to making our digital products and services accessible to everyone.

These people have become the accessibility champions.

Helping to lead digital accessibility 

As accessibility champions we help to lead digital accessibility in Co-op by empowering and supporting our colleagues through training, advice, and face to face support.

It’s easier to make changes to products and processes when you have people willing to put the hours in to make things happen. And people willing to talk all day about accessibility to keep the conversation going.

There are 6 of us from different disciplines in design, research, content, operations, engineering, and delivery. We also represent our many product teams in Food, Funeralcare, Insurance, Life Services and Membership.

Two of Co-op's accessibility champions chatting and smiling together as they look at their laptops in the office.

This breadth of skill and knowledge means we’re able to face challenges together and make a bigger impact in our Customer Product teams and beyond.

How we work  

We work in different product teams, but we feel a strong sense of belonging to the accessibility champions team too.

We wanted a structure, a purpose and clear objectives to give us a stronger focus for persuading people to take accessibility seriously.

So, we created a: 

  • Mission: to empower and support colleagues to create digital products, services, and communications for everyone, whatever their needs
  • Vision: to create a culture where accessibility is at the centre of everything we do at Co-op

We get together every 2 weeks to chat through how we’re doing against our objectives and tick off tasks on our Kanban board.  

This meeting also doubles up as a drop-in session where we invite colleagues to share their accessibility issues and ask for advice.

One of our objectives is to work more in the open and spread the word about the work we’ve been doing. We’ve provided more regular updates at All Design sessions and show and tells.

We also regularly post in our accessibility Slack channel about things we’ve learned or problems we’re trying to solve.

No longer a ‘side of the desk’ job 

Our Design and Digital leadership team support our efforts. They understand how important it is to remove barriers for our colleagues, customers and people thinking about choosing Co-op.

This year, one of our wider Digital Technology team objectives is to focus on accessibility. It’s given us an opportunity to move away from accessibility as a ‘side of the desk’ role. It’s allowed us to focus on the bigger tasks that were harder to finish.

We now have 3 days every 3 months to focus solely on accessibility as a team of champions. It’s helped us achieve more in the last 6 months than we have in years.

Our achievements

Introduced accessibility levels of responsibility

We’ve created 3 levels of responsibility for accessibility: 

  • Everyone in the Customer Products team – accessibility is everyone’s responsibility
  • Accessibility advocates – the voice for accessibility in a product team
  • Accessibility champions – help to lead digital accessibility in Co-op by empowering and supporting others

These levels outline what our colleagues should be doing to raise awareness and help improve our products and services. Before, this wasn’t clearly articulated so people found it difficult to know what was expected in their day-to-day roles.

Created an ‘accessibility advocate’ role and a learning journey

We recognised that some people wanted to do more for accessibility and be recognised for going beyond expectations.

Accessibility advocates are the bridge between product teams and accessibility champions. They have the knowledge of their product and work with accessibility champions to push for improvements in their teams.

We created a learning journey to better signpost advocates to resources that would improve their knowledge. We’ve also been helping them test issues with the product or service they’re working on, and have run peer support sessions on how to use assistive tech.

A Trello board showing Co-op's accessibility learning journey which details the different stages colleagues must go through to become accessibility advocates and accessibility champions.

It’s still a work in progress and we’re getting great feedback about how we can improve our approach. Having more advocates is central to us achieving our mission.

Improved our training session and materials 

One of our biggest successes is the accessibility training sessions we run once a month. As accessibility champions we pair up to facilitate sessions for digital colleagues.

Over the last year 46 people from Marketing, Comms, Data, and other departments across Co-op have attended.

The format of these sessions has largely been the same for the last 5 years, so we felt it was time for an overhaul of the content.

Originally named ‘Leaky flour training’ to entice people into attending, we recognised that this was not an accessible title and was putting many people off. So, we changed to ‘Digital accessibility awareness training’ and interest massively increased.

We’ve also banned the use of the term ‘a11y’ in our training materials and resources. Despite it being a widely recognised shortened version of ‘accessibility’, we felt it was not accessible for people who had limited knowledge.

Speaking internally and externally about our work 

We’re keen to share our learnings both in and outside Co-op. We spoke at our in-person internal Digital, Technology and Data conference attended by hundreds of Co-op colleagues. 

We also presented to teams at Citizens Advice and KPMG, exchanging knowledge and experiences.

What we’ve learned

We’ll never finish ‘doing accessibility’. We’re constantly learning and changing our processes to meet the needs of our customers, colleagues, and businesses. It’s still a battle to make sure accessibility is prioritised, especially when each of our businesses has its own roadmap of new initiatives.

The accessibility section on Co-op’s Experience Library is a valuable resource in educating people. But it’s far more powerful to show colleagues and stakeholders the real impact of people struggling to use our products through video clips and user research sessions. 

Fable, a provider of user research and accessibility testing, gives us access to a community of disabled people with various access needs who use different types of assistive technology. This has transformed our design and delivery process and made it much easier to test our ideas, prototypes, and live websites.

A screenshot of the Fable testing dashboard showing a self-guided task on the Funeralcare website. It shows an accessibility usability score of 100.

We can achieve so much more with leaders who advocate for accessibility and allow us extra time to focus on tasks.  

If you’re surrounded by passionate people, it makes the extra work enjoyable. We’re tackling it together, not alone.

Hannah France
Antonia Duffin 
Michelle May 
Phil Wolstenholme 
Phoebe Quayle 
Rachel Machin
Accessibility champions 

How user-centred design reduces risk for colleagues and our Co-op 

Matt Tyas

We’ve followed the Horizon Post Office scandal with empathy for everyone that it has impacted and is still affecting. It’s clear that the postmasters and their families were failed on many levels and we cannot address them all here.   

Looking at it from a digital technology perspective, it shows how important it is to build systems using user-centred design. Working in a user-centred way plays a valuable part in designing the right solutions for colleagues and customers. Listening to them, and questioning technology and processes, provides confidence that you are meeting their needs. It also mitigates the high-level risks and consequences of not testing or having active and open feedback channels. 

How we work in product teams to understand user needs  

User-centred design is based on understanding the tasks users need to perform and the environments they are in. It reduces the potential for us to negatively affect anyone who interacts with the Co-op.

We have specialists within our teams that make sure that our services are user-centred and delivering value to the Co-op. That value could be commercial, or creating efficiencies in how we work. 

Although skills often overlap, each specialism is an important part of a product team. Collaboration between disciplines helps us to consider everything within a user’s experience and design the right solutions. 

User researchers 

User researchers talk to the users of our services and provide insights to help the team make decisions. They empower team members and stakeholders to fully understand user needs and build confidence through testing. User researchers also help to identify and mitigate any problems with our services.  

Interaction designers 

Interaction designers are sometimes known as UX (user experience) designers. They help create accessible interfaces and consistent user experiences to solve user problems.  Interaction designers do things like sketching, creating digital prototypes and producing digital designs for a product or service.

Content designers 

Content designers create and organise information in the clearest way to help users complete tasks. They work closely with user researchers, interaction designers and engineers to make sure the content is accessible and easy to understand. 

Service designers 

Service designers design the end-to-end journeys of our services. They help teams to think about all channels to help users complete their goals. They align their work with business needs and measurable value. 

Product managers  

Product managers focus on the product vision, providing direction on objectives, strategy, the Co-op’s goals and wider market. They help to assess the value of work, prioritising it into plans that meet the team goals and contribute to sustainable growth.

Product owners  

Product owners translate strategy and objectives into tasks for designers and engineers to enable the team to deliver the product. In smaller product teams the product manager will also perform the duties of the product owner. Both roles work strategically and need to communicate with the team on how to achieve goals.  

Delivery managers 

Delivery managers enable their team to build and iterate user-centred services. They remove obstacles to progress, helping the team to explore better ways of working and deliver outcomes more effectively. 

Engineers 

Engineers craft the code that makes our digital products work for our users. Our engineers build software with users in mind and follow standards to ensure people have the best experience when they use our products. 

Quality coaches 

Quality coaches embed quality into every stage of product development, working with product, design, delivery and engineering specialists. They take a risk-based approach to tackle any problems early and deliver a high quality product or service.

Subject matter experts 

We work closely with the people who do the jobs we’re designing for (or the customers they serve). They are the experts, and we listen to their expertise and experiences, often co-designing solutions with them. 

Supporting teams 

At Co-op we take a service-first approach and the technology teams that support us make sure that our digital products are secure, robust and accurate.  

Why we start small and iterate  

We gradually improve products and services over time, which is sometimes called an ‘agile’ way of working. By using quick cycles of experimentation, learning and releases we can deliver value early and change direction quickly. If we learn something new about our market or spot any problems, we can fix it straight away and build everything else around a solid foundation.  

We define the most important features first, then work on the less important features over time. 

How we test to help us learn and improve  

We test to validate new ideas or create a better solution to an existing service. We use mock-ups, sketches, and other low-fidelity visuals like coded prototypes. By testing early, we can develop onto higher fidelity versions and products with more confidence.  

When we release products early and often, we reduce the risk involved in complex solutions. We also create value for Co-op and our customers or colleagues sooner. We test results consistently to see what’s working and what needs to be better. 

Why we collaborate and empower our team members 

We value collaboration and empowerment across teams. A product team owns their product and should be in full control of making changes to it.   

We collaborate closely with other teams and stakeholders to make sure that we’re considering all the factors that influence a product’s success.  

This means decision making sits closely with the experts of the product and its users, so that we can move quickly and gain the most value from our time. 

How user-centred design helps us avoid mistakes 

We make a minimum version of our work live as soon as we’re sure that it is working for our colleagues and customers. If a simple version is working well and doing what it needs to do, then we can build additional features on top.  

Fixing problems early or before we make something live, also helps us to save time and money. We avoid the expense of making changes on a higher fidelity product later. Most importantly, we minimise exposing our customers and colleagues to systems that impact them negatively or cause them harm. 

At Co-op we always want to do the best we can for our members, customers and colleagues. User-centred design is an important part of making sure we do this for our digital products and services.   

Thank you to the Content Design community and Customer Products team for their collaboration on this post.

Matt Tyas – Head of Design.

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How our users influenced our new forms guidance

Co-op

The Experience Foundations team recently updated our guidance on forms in our Experience Library.

Diagram of a web form with markers showing where different form elements are place and what they do

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.

Diagram showing how a form in one column is easier to use than a form in 2 columns

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.

Imran Afzal, Lead Designer

How and why we redefined our purpose at Co-op Experience

Co-op

We recently reorganised our teams and expertise so that people with interconnected, complementary skills could work more closely together. We also became the ‘Co-op Experience’ team. You can read about the details in Adam’s post.  

We now have teams and disciplines working together who didn’t necessarily work together before. Because our structure has changed, it’s more important than ever to be clear on our purpose. By ‘purpose’ we mean why each colleague and team is here, and how we’re all contributing to the overarching Co-op mission: ‘co-operating for a fairer world’.  

Working in the open so we’re all aligned 

At the end of last year, we began a piece of work to articulate our purpose. Putting it into coherent words means there’s no room for misinterpretation and we felt this would help each product team, each decision-maker and each individual move in the same direction. 

If we were in the office more often, we’d make posters and pin them up, but for now we’re publishing our purpose on the blog as an easy-to-reach reminder. 

A purpose for everyone, by everyone

Defining our purpose took several sessions over several weeks, but each step of the process was essential. We started small within the Senior Leadership team (SLT) for practical reasons – it’s much harder to facilitate a workshop with hundreds of people. But, our purpose governs the actions of everyone in the Co-op Experience team, so it was essential to give everyone a chance to feed into it. The best way to help everyone unite behind a shared purpose is by sharing a first draft for feedback. 

Here are the steps we took: 

  1. We held a workshop with the SLT within (what was) Digital Product and Design to think about why our team was formed and our role within the wider business. We worked through 3 questions initially which we borrowed from a Hyper Island toolkit: 
  • What is our job as a team? 
  • What’s our goal? How do we know when we’ve done our job? 
  • What benefit are we bringing to the company and the world? 
  1. We then analysed outputs and held several sessions to focus on the things we felt were lacking from the current purpose, and what we’re trying to achieve as a team. We also noted specific words which resonated (more on this below). 
  1. Then we opened things up. We used a slot at our fortnightly All Hands session to talk the wider team through the importance of having a purpose and our thinking so far. We presented an earlier version of our purpose and asked for feedback from (what was) the Digital Product and Design team. 
  1. We iterated again and presented a refined version of the vision back alongside some behaviours we used to bring the purpose to life. 

Choosing our words carefully 

During the workshops, we kept coming back to certain words that stood out as being particularly relevant to us. These were: 

  1. Expertise – we’re pleased to work alongside people with a range of expertise who each play their part in adding value to our customers and the business. (Adam’s post explains our experts’ skillsets).  
  1. Craft – this is closely linked with ‘expertise’ but it’s more about how we create things. We feel this word highlights the skilful and rigorous process behind creating, fine-tuning, optimising, and constantly iterating products, services and experiences.

We wove both words into the wording of our purpose. Here’s where we got to: 

We’re experts who care about the craft of building valuable products and services.  

We partner with experts within Co-op to focus on the outcomes that matter most to create value for our customers, members and communities, and in turn our Co-op. 

Encouraged behaviours tell us how we’ll fulfil our purpose 

While we were working towards articulating our purpose (the ‘what we are here to do’), we found ourselves considering the behaviours we need to encourage – in other words, the culture we need to nourish – to be able to do what we are here to do.  

We ended up with a set of 3.  

  1. Experimentation – we believe that giving people permission to experiment will help us learn more, more quickly and add more value.  
  1. Humility – so that everybody feels comfortable to contribute in a blameless environment.  
  1. Bravery – so that we can continue to support new and traditional business areas adopt practices that will help them thrive.  
Expanding on what we mean by ‘experimentation’, ‘humility’ and ‘bravery’ at Co-op Experience

These behaviours are Co-op Experience team-specific whereas our Ways of being are a set of expected behaviours across the whole of Co-op. 

We’ll revisit our purpose shortly and we won’t shy away from adapting it when we need to. We’ll share the work we’ve been doing on the Co-op Experience strategy shortly.

Lucy Tallon

Head of Design

Co-op Digital is now the ‘Co-op Experience’ team

The group of teams that most people know as Co-op Digital is now called ‘Co-op Experience’. This week, we brought the following interconnected and complementary expertise together under this new umbrella:  

  • Design, Content and Customer Experience (CX) – those who create strategic visions for future Co-op experiences and design journeys that deliver positive outcomes for customers and colleagues 
  • Product – those who align the customer and business strategies to set priorities that drive the outcomes we need to achieve  
  • Delivery – those who craft a culture and environment for a team to deliver better experiences 
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – those who create the very first interaction our customers have with our products and services 
  • Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) – those who carry out experiments within an experience to achieve better outcomes for customers and the business 

The reorganisation will give us more opportunities to work more closely. For example, it will be easier to embed experimentation and measurement from our CRO experts deeper into our product teams; and our Content Design community and SEO specialists have many complementary skills we can explore. Ultimately, our goal is to strengthen the team so we can improve customer, colleague and community experiences. 

We sit within the Digital Technology area of the Co-op and continue to work alongside our engineers in multi-disciplinary teams.

Restructuring to reflect (and enable more) growth 

Co-op Digital was set up back in 2016. Since then, we’ve grown exponentially and it’s been essential to reconsider our structure so that we can continue to grow and maximise the value we deliver in our products and services. As with all organisations, what worked to get us here won’t necessarily take us to where we want to be.  

The thinking behind the changes 

Our team name should indicate what we do. We’re still ‘digital’ in how we work, but the multiple possible interpretations make the term unhelpful.  

Our focus is on outcomes (the overarching aim) rather than outputs (for example, a straight-forward delivery checklist of features). An outcome can be achieved in many ways, and the solution is not always digital.  

Here’s a real example from our Membership team. 

An output is an instruction, such as: add Apple Pay to the Co-op Membership registration flow.  

It doesn’t give us much opportunity to explore how much value it may add. Its success can only be judged whether it was delivered. (It was? Ok, check ✅) 

However, we focused on an outcome. We wanted to: increase conversion by 10% in our Membership registration flow for new, in-store customers.  

The team wasn’t dictated to and instead, it was free to explore different solutions that may have been quicker, cheaper and more impactful than simply adding Apple Pay. 

In this particular case, we delivered the outcome by iterating paper leaflets in-store. The solution did not involve ‘digital’ at all. 

Our work is not bound by screens and apps. Crafting valuable services and positive experiences for our customers, colleagues and communities is the highest priority for this group of teams. This is why ‘Experience’ now better reflects what we’re striving for. 

Adam Warburton

Chief Product Officer