Co-operate

Why an up-to-date service map is essential when teams change direction

May 4, 2020May 4, 2020Co-op2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, we published a post about how it took us 9 days to launch the Get or offer support service on the Co-operate platform. Part of that post explains how we were able to pivot so quickly from our roadmap to respond to emerging user needs.

For example, the team:

communicated and collaborated constantly to avoid confusion
worked in agile ways to learn fast and iterate
deferred to the design system to save time on decision making

In this post, Claudia and Leila from ustwo (who we’ve been working with) explain why our service map has been essential for direction, alignment and redesigning the information architecture.

What’s a service map?

Teams working on a digital service create a service map, ideally alongside stakeholders. The aim is to show everything that’s needed to maintain the live service with real customers and include all the moving parts from across the business. It means everyone has visibility of gaps and where improvements are needed. A service map changes as the service does – it’s never finished.

(That’s an overview but you can read more about what service maps are and why digital teams bother in this old post).

Our Get or offer support service map

The service map for Get or offer support shows the:

Front stage – this covers the interaction between people who have asked for help and our call centre, as well as the interaction between people who have asked for help and the people offering it.

Back stage – this covers the Co-operate platform which includes Contentful (the content management system), Smartsurvey (which we use to gather user data), our call centre and their data logging in Salesforce (which is used to securely store data)

We’re beginning to map the other Co-op business units who use the data Co-operate asks for in order to complete the user’s task. Co-op Health, for example, who will provide support with medication for those in England.

Changing direction and reflecting it in the homepage

Co-operate has always been about helping people come together to make good things happen in their community. But the lockdown meant communities were no longer able to come together in person – which is why we needed to change the way Co-operate brought people together.

We reflected the changes in the homepage.

Previously, the focus of the homepage was finding and adding activities listed on the site. Our ‘how-to’ guides were also quite prominent.

Now, the focus of the homepage is on matching people who would like support with those who can offer some.

The homepage is the place where users will immediately recognise our change of direction – it’s obvious because they can see it. But a change in direction has a knock-on effect for the rest of the service too and the team is responsible for making sure it runs smoothly.

Here’s where the service map became invaluable.

Updating the service map: a priority not an afterthought

We updated the service map to reflect it the change of direction. We never view updating a service map as an administrative task – it is essential to the development of the service and to the team’s alignment. Without it, detail is overlooked and teams pull in different directions.

We knew it would help:

highlight where decisions needed to be made
communicate changes once, clearly, to everyone (particularly essential when we are all working remotely)
give the business units (such as Co-op Health and Co-op Food) an overview of where they fit in the bigger Co-operate service

The service map as a comms tool

We’ve used the service map in various workshops to collaborate with stakeholders and map out how the process has changed. We’ve found that showing them a visual representation of the service has been helpful because it moves the service away from something abstract – something they can’t necessarily see like data passing between 2 points – to something concrete that they can understand more quickly.

Having something to literally point at when explaining why we need an urgent decision on something has been invaluable.

During the workshops we’ve shown the stages of the service in a sequence of building blocks such as registration, vetting, training and matching those in need with those who can support. We’ve broken down each building block together to help each team member focus on what we want to achieve.

Making things quicker for users

Service maps focus on users: how a user gets from A to B. Using Co-operate: Get or offer support service map with stakeholders has meant we can naturally guide conversations back to the users – very useful because the ‘user first’ approach isn’t instinctive to people working outside digital.

The visual representation of the service helped us identify the steps followed by a user, and the steps followed by a call centre colleague. Seeing those 2 sets of steps together showed us we could get rid of duplication (asking for consent twice, unnecessarily) and reduce the amount of effort we were asking for from our users.

Service mapping is multi-functional

A large part of how we were able to get a new service live in 9 days was down to the service map. It showed the team an overview, it showed the team the intricate detail. We’ll continue to update it as Get and offer support matures.

Leila Byron, Service design lead
Claudia Ehmke, Product principal

How we launched ‘Co-operate: get or offer support’ in 9 days

April 7, 2020April 7, 2020Co-op3 Comments

Last week we launched ‘Co-operate: get or offer support during coronavirus’, 9 days after the UK Government announced lockdown.

We knew that lockdown would have one of 2 effects on people:

I need help.
I want to use my time and skills to help people.

Our ‘g et and offer support’ service connects someone who needs support with organisations, groups and schemes that can help.

This post is about what has made it possible for us to change direction and respond to emerging user needs quickly.

Co-operate has always been about community

Co-operate, an online platform that helps bring communities together, launched last May. We wanted to make it easier for people to come together and change their communities for the better.

Co-operate allows you to:

see what’s happening – find local events and activities that benefit you and your community (fewer are going ahead during lockdown, of course)
find volunteers – if you’re an organiser and would like to find people to help to run a community event, activity or group
add an event – list a community activity or event
see ‘How to’ guides – for advice, tools and templates to help you make good things happen in your community
read inspiring stories – good things that had happened as a result of people coming together in their communities

We wanted to help people come together to make good things happen in their community.

We were growing region by region as we learned what worked for each community – we were live in Leeds, Bollington, Trafford. Next up was Camden.

But the lockdown meant communities were no longer able to come together in person. The clean-up initiatives and walking groups we were encouraging, now couldn’t happen.

So the way Co-operate brought people together needed to change.

The need for community and co-operation is stronger now than ever

Our priorities quickly shifted to meet the emerging needs of our communities.

We wrote guides to:

help organisers move their activities and events online
teach people how to attend an online activity or event
give tips to help stay healthy and entertained at home

We contacted the organisers who had events on Co-operate to offer to help move them online.

Supporting online communities over geographical ones (for now)

Focusing on online activities caused us to think about what we meant by community – it was no longer just geographical. Activities and events could be viewed by anyone with internet access. Co-operate was now catering to a national, rather than a regional audience.

Despite the many and varied changes we were adapting to, it was overwhelmingly clear that the main aspiration of Co-operate remained: people want to support each other and do good.

So, our priority became finding a way to allow people across the UK to ‘get or offer support’ in their community.

There are a lot of initiatives being formed, and online activities and events being set up at the moment. We want to help people make sense of everything that’s available and direct them to the most relevant place to get or offer support.

The service went live on Co-operate on Wednesday 1 April. As of today (7 April) so far we’ve had:

343 people asking for support
3,217 people offering support

We wanted people to be able to use this service as soon as possible. We’ve worked hard, been confused, and had a lot of Zoom calls to try and get this up and running.

Here are some things that have helped.

Collaborating through a crisis

We work in a multi-disciplinary team. That means we have the skills within the team to get a digital service up and running. But this service has relied on the expertise of so many more. We’ve been working with organisers in communities and Member Pioneers, as well as colleagues in marketing, legal, risk, membership and customer relationship management.

We have regular calls, daily check ins, fortnightly show and tells and work together in shared documents.

And we work in an agile way. That means we start small, test it, get feedback and improve it. Working in this way means it’s been easier to adapt to changes quickly – we’re not tied into pre-internet-era ‘big IT’-style technology.

It’s not always been easy adapting to other team’s priorities, and sometimes the level and range of input has felt overwhelming, but getting expertise from so many areas and professions means we’re:

working transparently and collaboratively to get things right (or as right as we can) from the start
reducing duplication of work across Co-op
delivering a service faster
creating a service that works for more people

Using a tried and tested design system

We’ve written, designed and released the service within 9 days.

We wouldn’t have been able to do this so rapidly without the established design patterns, components and content style guide within Co-op’s design system.

Our team includes people who are new to Co-op, freelance designers working for Co-op and UsTwo, a design agency working with Co-operate. The design system has allowed people with little or no experience of designing with the Co-op brand to:

write in Co-op’s tone and style – a style that’s clear, inclusive and respectful
create designs that are visually consistent with other Co-op services – making it easier for people to recognise it as a Co-op service and trust it

It’s meant we can move fast without sacrificing design quality.

Ryan Hussey, Interaction Designer on Co-operate said: “I’ve found the design system has made mine and Rob Swift’s designs a lot more consistent. It’s made throwing new landing pages, like the ‘How to…’, a lot quicker to design and standardised the build for the software engineers.”

Learning that ‘enough’ is better than perfect

We’ve been designing how to ‘get and offer support’ at the same time as working out the operation and processes that will hold it together. There’s understandably been a lot of discussion, changes of direction and boundary-moving while we’ve been working this out.

This means that content and designs have been changed or thrown away as we gain more certainty about the service. We’ve iterated and adapted as more information becomes available. And we’ll continue to do this.

The ever-changing nature of what we’re doing means it’s impossible to create a perfect service. We have to create, build and release quickly if this is going to be useful for people. There’s no time to obsess.

Instead we’ve learnt that ‘good enough’ is more useful than ‘perfect’. Our priority was to get value into the hands – and homes – of our users as soon as possible. We started small and we’re learning and iterating fast. The service will change, adapt and grow over time as we understand more about how it can be useful to people.

If you’ve signed up to ‘get or offer support’ we’d love to get your feedback. This will help us make it better for the people who need it most.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone at Co-op who has helped make this service real, and to everyone who has offered support.

Coming together to make good things happen is more important than ever. As Adam Warburton, Head of Digital Products, said:

“Now is the moment that community is in the consciousness of everyone in the country. Now could be the start of a new community movement.”

We hope so.

The Co-operate team

2019 highlights: there’s a lot to be proud of

December 17, 2019December 18, 2019Co-op

Today the Co-op Digital team came together at our Christmas conference to share and celebrate our successes from 2019.

This year hasn’t been without its challenges but it’s important to reflect on what we’ve achieved thanks to talented and conscientious delivery teams, communities of practice, and individuals. Their commitment to meeting colleague, member and customer needs is unfaltering.

Here’s to many more victories in 2020.

‘One web’ platform

In 2019, we’ve increased the number of websites, products and services on the coop.co.uk platform from 3 to 10. Between May and October this year we had over 4 million visitors – that’s an increase of over 200% for the same months in 2018.

Next year we’ll continue to replatform our business sites – we re-platformed Co-op Food and most of Funeralcare this year and in 2020 we’ll be prioritising Co-op Legal services and Insurance. The aim is to give teams autonomy over their own sites so they’ll be able to update content themselves and use the Design system as a guide to improve brand familiarity.

Rebekah Barry, Content designer

Funeralcare customer-facing work

This year we got involved in the customer journey after focusing on colleagues for so long.

In February, we created the ‘service map of a death’, which shows everything people do after a death.

It includes the touchpoints with our service, pain points and opportunity. The map formed the basis for a year of digital working on the customer journey and played a part in building the exec’s confidence in our ability to deliver a great customer experience that would help Co-op Funeralcare meet its goal: increase funeral numbers.

We created ‘After party’ – how we’d disrupt recommendation and consideration in the Funeralcare market. It showed the problem isn’t around which tool people use to plan for their funeral, but how Co-op Funeralcare can motivate people to plan theirs. This piece of work stopped the exec simply buying a later life planning tool and gave them the confidence to ask us to work on the Funeralcare website. We were also commissioned to create the new visual design and do discovery into priority areas, ready to start creating new features in 2020.

So many highlights, so little space. But Rae, Tom, Helen and Gail have smashed it out of the park all year.

Hannah Horton, Principal designer

Digital Skills team

We help teams in the wider Co-op adopt digital culture and agile ways of working. In 2019:

457 people attended one of our agile masterclasses
we coached 22 teams in agile ways of working
450 people attended a training session or workshop
we’ve partnered with teams on 2 discoveries

Our highlight of the year was collaborating with members of the People team on a discovery to understand how colleagues experience and understand their benefits package.

Above is a thank you card – we’re very proud to have influenced ways of working and helping the team become more user-centric.

Vicki Riley, User researcher

Guardian plans

Guardian plans is part of Co-op Funeralcare and aims to improve the experience of creating a pre-paid funeral plan. Traditionally, a colleague filled in paper forms, posted them to head office and the information was typed into our system. The new site allows colleagues to add information during a meeting with a client which means it’s recorded instantly – it used to take up to 7 days. It has also improved accuracy.

This year, we tested the site in 2 regions, learnt lots, iterated and scaled up. Now, over 90% of pre-paid funeral plans from over 1000 funeral homes come through Guardian plans.

Liam Cross, Product manager

Shifts

In 2019 we’ve iterated, researched, and iterated again on the Shifts’ ‘exceptions’ feature which helps managers make sure colleagues are paid correctly for extra hours they’ve worked. We ran 2 trials involving 130 or our 2661 stores (around 5%) and now around 15% of all exceptions are managed through Shifts.

Here’s some of the feedback:

We’ve also helped reduce the most common type of payroll error by almost 49% and colleagues have praised how Shifts helps stores find cover for shifts at short notice.

In the last half of 2019 we averaged 4 releases a month (around twice as many as in the first half).

Thank you to subject matter expert Julie Haselden at head office – she’s been so generous in sharing her knowledge.

Robyn Golding, Delivery manager

Tech ops

In 2019, the Tech ops team completed:

1,065 changes (as of 10 Dec) with a change success rate of 98.21%
1,127 service requests such as new starters, Leavers and access requests
27 stories and 118 sub tasks since we changed to 3-weekly sprints in September

Steven Allcock, Digital service manager

Pay in aisle, Visit and SmartGap (Operational Innovation Store team)

Our team looks after 3 services used in Co-op Food stores. Here are our 2019 highlights:

Pay in aisle – lets customers skip queues by paying for items on your phone. Trial in 32 stores with a significantly improved, frictionless user experience, reaching up to 1% of transactions across particularly engaged stores.
SmartGap – removes a cumbersome, time-consuming daily paper process. We’ve gone from prototype, to alpha and beta within 9 months, it is now rolling out to all stores to save colleagues time, and over 20 million sheets of paper and better product availability for customers.
Visit (as shown above) – replaced the need for a signing in book with a digital sign-in on till screens. Saving colleague time, and meaning we are more compliant with asbestos and fire safety, and can better track our contractors.

Charles Burdett, Designer

We’ve had loads to celebrate this year but we’ve pulled these points out as our highlights of 2019. We’re proud because:

12% of people are returning to Co-operate
feedback about the platform has been positive – for example: “How fantastic that Co-op are empowering communities!”
the community has added over 300 events to our ‘What’s happening’ page since July
there were 1,600 page views in 2 weeks for our ‘How to organise a community event’ guides …
… and the feedback on them was good too, for example: “A really useful guide for organising community events!”, “This is great, really useful” and “Love this, what a great idea!”

Special shout out to Natalie Evans, our community subject matter expert and resident Member Pioneer. Her energy and focus have been incredible.

Ben Rieveley and Jen Bowden-Smith, Product managers

Food Ecommerce

This year we’ve replaced the proof of concept third-party front end with our own. When the 2 were running side by side, the performance stats from 12 to 24 November showed:

for London traffic on mobile conversion rate increased from 3.3% to 5.15% (a 56% percent increase)
A 22% decrease in bounce rate on mobile

Regular workshops and working transparently have helped us create valuable relationships with the wider Co-op Food Ecommerce team. We’ve also been able to show value in our approach and have started to change the way some of the business team interact with us for guidance, as opposed to just delivery.

A great team to work with. Challenging (in the right way!). Always pushing us to think of the customer first and to be different when the easiest thing is to stick with the familiar.

Gary Kisby, Head of Web Operations

Sophia Ridge, Product manager

Digital newsletter

The newsletter gently pokes the organisation to look at future digital opportunities and threats, and it helps show public readers what we’re thinking.

Subscriber growth is around 170% year on year and the open rate is approximately 50%. Big thanks to beloved readers, Richard Sullivan, Jack Fletcher, Linda Humphries and everyone else who has sent stories to the #newsletter Slack channel.

Rod McLaren

Co-op Digital blog

In 2019 we published 32 posts, by 41 authors – 22 of these identify as female, 19 as male. We’ve heard from a range of seniorities but a less balanced mix of disciplines – 7 posts from researchers; 3 posts about product decisions and the same number about delivery; but only 1 post by an engineer. We’ve gained 169 subscribers – some internal, many from orgs like Citizen’s Advice and the fin tech sector.

My highlight was working with the Design team on a series of posts to support their 90 minute show and tell which explained the benefits of being a design-led business to our stakeholders.

The design team held a 90 minute show and tell and invited colleagues from across the organisation. “If everyone understands the benefits of being design-led, it’s easier to work together to deliver value to customers, colleagues and the Co-op.” https://t.co/aa0aVZ0I3a

— Co-op Digital Team (@CoopDigital) March 11, 2019

The posts are something to point at when stakeholders would like to know more about our ways of working.

Amy McNichol

Customer and member

We’ve made a lot of improvements for customers and members this year. Here we are looking at our screens and the big screen.

Here are our top 10 in no particular order.

We’ve made 339 changes to date with 98% success rate and 99.5% availability.
We launched the Co-op app and it’s had nearly 200,000 downloads.
We’ve built a single place to sign into Co-op online services (500,000 API calls a day).
Fought off constant bot army attacks.
We launched digital offers and members are making around 656,000 offer selections a month.
Local causes pay out supported (£17M paid out!).
This year was the first time we’ve launched with 3 new local causes in every community. This was made easier at least in part because we helped with changes to remove the need for the charities aid foundation vetting and paying out to causes.
All new systems were built with serverless technology.
Reduced AWS cost by more than £5,200 per month.

Paul D’Ambra, Principal software engineer

Co-op Insurance

Co-op Insurance design team won Best in Digital – Direct to Customer at the Insurance Times ‘Tech and Innovation’ awards.

The judges were impressed with our customer and metric-focused approach, alongside the lengths we go to benchmarking ourselves against competitors and better understanding the challenges customers face, now and in the future.

Azra Keely, Optimisation consultant

Legal services

We are a new team working on a series of alphas to test if we can increase sales and product mix by using a conversational tool.

The first alpha is to help recommend the type of will someone should get. Wills are challenging to understand and research has told us they’re not at the forefront of people’s minds. We want to educate people about what wills can protect against and which will might be right for their circumstances. We are working closely with our stakeholders and we’re really pleased they’re attending our user research sessions showing they are bought in to listening to user needs.

Liam Cross, Product manager

Guardian

Last year, we completed the rollout of Guardian to all Co-op funeral homes across the UK (over 1000!). In 2019, our focus has been continued iteration and improvement.

25% of users responded to a National Promoter Score (NPS) style survey we sent out and the average rating was 7.5 out of 10 – positive but still room for improvement. We worked closely with our 2 least satisfied groups of users, to design solutions to their problems.

We developed 8 new features, eradicated 3 bits of time-consuming paperwork and simplified workflows to save over 100 hours of time to-date. We got some excellent feedback from colleagues about the changes we made. One said:

Hi Guardian Team, just wanted to say thank you for all the previous changes done recently. From a Funeral service operative point of view it has helped amazingly.

We’ve also done lots of work to increase the stability and resilience of Guardian, with some major missions to improve our release process, our backups and re-work some legacy features to keep them fit for the future.

Daniel Owen, Product manager

Co-op Health app

In May we launched the Co-op Health app. In the app you can order your repeat medication and choose how to get it – either collect it from your chosen pharmacy, or get it delivered to your door for free.

Different GP surgeries use different systems to manage their patient’s prescription. Since launching the app we’ve integrated with more of these systems, meaning patients from 99% of surgeries in England can use our app.

In October we were also the first service in the UK to offer ‘NHS login’. This means people can choose how they register for Co-op Health – either by visiting their GP surgery or completely online (using NHS login). Around 20% of new customers choose to register using NHS login.

Being the first organisation to use NHS login is a massive coup for Co-op. We’ve worked closely with NHS Digital, sharing designs and feedback. Massive credit to Jack Fletcher, Dan Cork, Catherine Malpass, Ben Dale, Ayub Malik, Andrew Bailey, Stephen Gatenby, Alex Potter and the rest of the Health team for making this happen.

So far, we’ve delivered 12,447 prescriptions to customers and have a 4.1* rating in the Google Play and Apple app store.

Joanne Schofield, Content designer

Co-operate: an online platform to bring communities together

May 30, 2019benrieveley

We recently launched Co-operate, an online platform aimed at bringing communities closer together.

So far, our research has told us we should be designing something that makes it easier for people to:

start local groups and find others to team up with
find a community space
club together financially to reach a goal
come together and campaign for something they’re passionate about

As always, we’ve started small. We’ve restricted Co-operate to one area for now: Stretford in Manchester.

This post talks about the research that’s shaped the product, what we’ve done so far, and why Co-operate is so very ‘Co-op’.

Community is part of what all co-operatives stand for

The Co-op shares many values with other co-operatives including ‘self-help’ (members joining together and making a difference) and ‘self-responsibility’ (every member supporting their co-op’s activities and using its products and services and encouraging others to support it too).

‘Concern for the community’ is one of the Co-op principles. One of the ways we demonstrate this is by giving 1% of what members spend on Co-op branded products to a local community cause of their choice. Since we launched the new Co-op Membership in 2016, £31.7 million has been invested in around 4,000 community projects thanks to members’ 1%. This has supported a range of community groups including adult literacy classes, youth clubs and schemes that bring isolated older people together close to where they live.

Our new Co-operate platform is an extension of these values and principles. It aims to help communities to make changes autonomously through co-operation – it’s a natural fit for the Co-op.

Clarifying the problem

Last year Co-op started to look into communities. The previous exploration and tests showed us that the combination of people and technology can make it easier for people to co-operate. Over the years, we’ve interviewed volunteers, charity workers, social entrepreneurs and community leaders to find out what’s stopping local communities from coming together to make themselves stronger.

Their research reaffirmed our assumption and we’ve recently been able to clarify the problem: People find it hard to connect and make things happen in their local community.

From this, we set our vision: Build the one place to go to make things happen in local communities.

Ambitious, bold and exciting.

Starting small and locally

As with all digital products we knew that we would need to start small, test, learn and iterate. We decided to do a series of hyper-local trials across Greater Manchester and build collaboratively with users in those areas.

We started in Stretford by assembling a small, multi-disciplinary team and behaving like a start-up. We wanted to build a lean version of the service so we could learn quickly, without wasted effort. By manually adding content ourselves rather than building an expensive content management system, we know what is useful.

Listening to users

We’ve been talking to community organisers in Stretford – the heroes who have managed to start groups that benefit the local area. They’ve told us about the challenges they’ve had to overcome and the ones they’re still struggling with. Most told us:

promoting events time-consuming
finding more volunteers is hard
co-ordinating volunteers is difficult
getting access to funding is complicated
connecting with other organisers doesn’t happen often

A lot of this is consistent with the research that was done last year. But we are now in direct contact with these people, and see them as an extension of our team. They are the subject matter experts – they’re living and breathing life in a community every day and pushing to improve things for many.

First feature: a ‘digital noticeboard’

As a result of listening and observing, we’ve built a product that pulls together local events and activities that benefit the local area in some way. It’s a kind of digital noticeboard for Stretford called ‘What’s happening’.

We’ve set up a simple, flexible architecture using our Heroku prototype platform along with Contentful, Algolia and Gatsby.js. This lets us quickly try things whilst at the same time being secure and performant.

To get to this point we:

Took photos of all the noticeboards in the area.
Analysed the information and grouped it into categories.
Set up our content management interface and added in the information.
Tested it with users (Stretfordians).
Improved the UX and re-wrote some of the content to make it clearer for users.

You can see this at co-op.co.uk/co-operate.

Next time, we’ll share why we started with a ‘What’s Happening’ product and the next product that we are starting to develop.

If you want to get in touch, email us at co-operate@coopdigital.co.uk

We’re particularly interested in understanding what you’d need to know before you would commit time to helping out in your local area.

Ben Rieveley
Product manager