If someone is arranging a funeral, we know that they often also need probate. Probate is the legal process of dealing with someone’s money, property and possessions after they have died.
Co-op offers both services but they are operated by 2 different Co-op businesses: arranging a funeral is owned by Co-op Funeralcare, and applying for probate is owned by Co-op Legal Services. But the way we’re organised internally is irrelevant to customers – what matters to them is a cohesive journey and a frictionless experience.
We wanted to join up the services to create a seamless experience that helps our customers understand what they need to do, and get what they need.
Bringing the services closer together
We started by understanding the existing customer experience. We spoke to people who had recently arranged a funeral, and learned that many did not:
understand probate or whether they needed it
know that Co-op Legal Services offered probate
know that they could get the cost of the funeral covered if they used Co-op Legal Services for probate
We wanted to help people understand if they needed probate and, if they did, make it straightforward for them to get it. We also wanted to make it clear when probate wasn’t needed, to reduce stress and avoid wasting people’s time.
And we could do this by:
understanding what the existing user journeys were
learning from customers and colleagues
explaining probate at the points where it was most relevant
making it clear what probate is and when it’s needed
using clear, understandable language
Understanding what exists
Helen Lawson facilitated a content audit. That’s a thorough analysis of the existing content to help us identify the points where it’s relevant to talk about probate. We are a business and although making money is one of our aims, it doesn’t mean shoehorning sales opportunities into a user journey at inappropriate times. We wanted to understand where it was genuinely in the customer’s best interest to know about probate. For example, when we write about costs, we could explain how Co-op Legal Services could cover the cost of the funeral upfront if the customer uses them for probate.
We had to be deliberate. We understand our funeral customers are often distressed and have many competing priorities. We knew we didn’t want to get in the way of them completing the task they came to do – arranging a funeral. If we did, we’d make the process more stressful and more time consuming, and we’d increase the risk of them leaving the site and going elsewhere. So, to avoid getting in our customers’ way, it was just as important to decide where not to put the content.
It was a collaborative effort. We relied on:
the knowledge of people who dealt with our Funeralcare customers
the expertise of colleagues in Funeralcare and Legal Services
insights from research with people who had recently arranged a funeral
our skills in content, design, data and customer experience
Designing the content
Probate is complicated. To make it understandable, and not get in the way, we need to be clear and get to the point fast.
We explain what probate is in clear English.
We knew we couldn’t assume that our customers had any prior knowledge of the subject matter. Many may never have had to deal with a funeral before, and even if they have, that might not have involved dealing with probate. If we use complex terminology without explaining it, we risk overwhelming, frustrating, and alienating people. So where we could, we used clear English, to make it easier and quicker for people to understand. Where we had to use legal terminology, we explained it in understandable terms. Doing this makes us more inclusive.
We explained when probate might not be needed.
We did this to help get relevant information to people quickly– so that the people who don’t need probate don’t waste their time calling us. And the people who do need it, are directed to call us – that means we get the right help, to the right people. It saves our customers, and us, time.
We also did some other things across the Funeralcare journey:
broke up the text with more sub-headings and into smaller paragraphs which are easier for people to read
used bullets for lists so people can scan them more easily
linked out rather than duplicated content – reducing content maintenance costs as it only has to be kept up to date in one place
moved relevant actions up the page, so we can help people earlier in their journey, without overwhelming them with content
included links to the bereavement notification service, which is a free service for people who arrange a funeral with us, so especially relevant to our audience
It worked
As a result of the content changes on the webpages, 35% of all Funeralcare traffic now check if they need probate as part of their journey.
The most effective services are those which are focused on the customer’s needs and those which are not bound by departmental silos. By focusing on making the customer’s experience better, across whatever channels and departments that involves, we can create services that help people, increase loyalty and make our business more successful.
In February, we published a post explaining how and why we’ve restructured. It focused on our colleagues whose expertise lay within Design, Product, Delivery, SEO and CRO who we now call the Co-op Experience team.
Earlier this year, the Experience team moved into Co-op’s Digital Technology function. Engineering is one of the disciplines that sits within Digital Technology. Experience and Engineering often work together in multidisciplinary teams to bring the right combination of expertise together, at the right time, to create value for Co-op customers, colleagues and the business through our products and services.
Alongside this, Engineering has its own specific aims that ultimately support an improved, seamless customer experience.
Here are our priorities for the next year.
Make it easier for engineers to get on with it
Many organisations that build web and cloud-based products and services have internal platform teams focused on improving engineering productivity. Co-op is no exception. We’ve recently brought an Engineering Productivity team together – a team of engineers who protect the rest of our engineers’ time by removing challenges that get in the way of us delivering value for customers and colleagues. They’ll do this by identifying where we’re duplicating effort across the engineering community and as far as possible, they will create standardised approaches.
Our Engineering Productivity team will harvest, build and curate a collection of engineering resources that help to accelerate the creation of new products and services. These will sit alongside the existing Experience Library and Front-end Toolkit already curated by other parts of Co-op Technology.
Examples from the Engineering Productivity team’s roadmap include:
common build pipelines so we can remove maintenance responsibilities from engineers, and make it easier to spin up new teams
identifying useful common components, such as automated security testing in the build pipeline, and productionising them to make them available to all engineers across the estate
how we bake standards into artefacts so that teams spend less time checking compliance
We believe that by reducing the cognitive load for engineers, they’ll be able to focus on solving new problems rather than spending time on problems that have already been solved elsewhere.
Developing ‘product mindsets’
It doesn’t matter which multidisciplinary team our engineers are part of, or whether they’re responsible for foundational platforms, business platforms or products, everyone needs a product mindset. We want to develop and embed this thinking more. Here’s why.
Since the early days of Co-op Digital, our engineers have been working closely with Design, User Research, Delivery and Product as part of multi-disciplinary teams. Together, we have been focused on delivering customer value through early delivery, rapid feedback loops, and test-and-learn to create effective, usable products and services that perform well. Because we’ve approached things with the same ‘product mindset’, we’ve met the needs of both internal colleagues and external customers. We’re looking to apply this mindset across our wider technology estate.
We consider platforms to be like inward-facing products and a good example of this is the Co-op’s Food E-commerce business area, which has become particularly important since the start of the pandemic. Within it, is our On-demand groceries service which lives on the coop.co.uk platform, as well as convenience and delivery options to order Co-op products through Deliveroo and Amazon. We have multiple product teams around the Food E-commerce space providing value directly to our customers. These product teams draw on services provided by a set of platforms teams which do things such as integrating external marketplaces and courier apps; doing the background work in terms of search functionality and data loading; or providing standard e-commerce functions such as baskets and product information. These platform teams, such as our Unified Commerce Platform, focus on the needs of their own internal customers, such as the Online Shop team, and evolve their own roadmaps to meet the needs of those internal customers.
The Co-op Food E-commerce business is just one example of how we are adapting the way we work to put our customers, whether external or internal, at the centre of our engineering delivery.
Continue to support engineers in a very varied landscape
Co-op was founded in 1844 so it is a really old business. We have many business areas, and there are multiple products and services within each of them. Those products and services have been created at different times – some with the foresight that the internet era is here to stay, others not so much. This means that our engineers can find themselves working across a large and varied portfolio containing a variety of challenges from early-stage discovery work on greenfield products through to heavy lifting work on some of the more established systems which power our £10 billion turnover retail food business.
We try to ensure that our engineers have a broad toolkit of technologies, techniques and practices which they can draw on to do the most effective engineering they can on the systems they are working on. Some techniques such as test-driven development are very much core practices, whereas the use of other techniques will vary based on the context. Teams might use a mix of ensemble programming, pair programming or pull requests based on things like the system they are working on; the makeup of the team, and the work they’re doing.
Our teams can adapt their ways of working over time as the team context changes. As long as they conform to our software development standards they can work in a way that is most effective for their context.
One of our priorities is to equip our engineers with a broad toolkit of techniques and practices that they can choose from to address the specific challenges they are facing. They can improve their toolkit through our Engineering Community of Practice sessions, code club or video club.
Increase pastoral support
We’ve recently made changes to alter the Engineering team’s structure. We’ve moved away from a set-up where almost everyone had line manager responsibilities towards a more simplified structure. We’ve done this because we found that those people were effectively doing 2 jobs: engineer and line manager. This isn’t necessarily the direction that everyone wants to go in and although managing others helps grow people skills, changing context is hard. So, we’ve introduced Engineering Managers. Their role is 100% focused on people, their development and helping them map their careers. It means one-to-ones are now more productive because line managers (now Engineering Managers) are no longer juggling 2 jobs.
Before we became part of the Co-op Content Design community, Marianne worked in marketing and communications, and Mary was a copywriter. Like most content designers and content strategists at Co-op, we moved into this discipline from roles that also demanded strong writing skills. At Co-op, we work alongside many disciplines that also depend on well-crafted written words, for example, the Brand, Marketing, Communications, and the PR teams.
We’re writing this post to unpick some of the similarities and differences between content design at Co-op, and our experience of other content disciplines. We hope that by sharing this we can improve understanding of how these disciplines can relate and even overlap, but also highlight the things that are specific to content design within multi-disciplinary teams.
Marianne and Mary in a workshop.
What content design means at Co-op
Content design is about putting the right thing, in the right place, at the right time and in the right format.
That’s how our Content community defines what we do.
For us, good content design:
meets a user need (this means it has a well-defined purpose and fulfils it)
Content designers zoom in and look at the details. For example, we choose the words that create long or short-form content. But we also look at a wider context. We decide whether we need to create content at all. If we conclude that we do, we ask where it should live, and in which order and format it should be presented so that it clearly conveys meaning to the reader.
If it’s not accessible, it’s not good content design
Accessibility underpins everything we do in the Co-op Experience team. It means we build products and services that everyone can use, including people:
As content designers, we choose words that are clear not clever.
That can take some getting used to when you’ve worked as a copywriter. We had some bad habits to unlearn from previous roles. For example, we would often plaster over complex processes with words and phrases like:
quick and simple
this only takes 2 minutes
you’ll need your NHS number handy
We were assuming a certain level of speed or ability. In reality, what’s easy for one user might be difficult for another. User research told us that putting your phone down, climbing upstairs and rifling through old letters to find your NHS number was not ‘handy’. Some people might struggle to do this at all. Deleting one word can make all the difference and, in this example, it makes more sense to more people if we leave ‘handy’ out.
Before becoming content designers, we worked in teams according to our specialism at the time. For example, a communications team is usually made up of several comms specialists and there’s usually a hierarchy within it. It’s the same for digital marketing experts, PR people, or editorial teams.
At Co-op, it’s different. Here, our expertise sits alongside other sets of expertise and we’re part of multi-disciplinary teams that include service designers, interaction designers, researchers, delivery managers, front end developers, engineers, business analysts. We also work with subject matter experts like store managers in the Co-op Food business and leaders of community projects.
We each bring our different but complementary skill sets to the team, and we work together to deliver a cohesive customer (or colleague) experience. Often, there will only be one expert in a certain discipline per team. This means we’re empowered to make decisions on the things that fall under our remit.
Support from the content design community of practice
As content designers, sense-checking and support comes from our community of practice (CoP). This is a safe space for others in similar roles across different product or service teams.
At Co-op, the Content CoP gets together twice a month. We learn by sharing, seeing or discussing content in different contexts. This often involves content designers asking for feedback on presentations or prototypes through a ‘content crit’ (group critiques), or we talk through case studies to share what has been successful. CoPs provide the kind of support that content creators might experience from their team in a traditional editorial or writing role.
“Meeting twice a month with likeminded content people is brilliant, and taking part in content crits has helped me become less protective of my work.”
Sophie Newbery, content designer, Funeralcare
All good content is grounded in good research
Whether it’s content marketing, PR, video journalism, or magazine feature writing, successful content depends on thorough research and a good understanding of your audience. We work alongside dedicated user researchers whose role is to help the team learn about our users so we can design the right thing for them.
Together we:
facilitate usability and accessibility testing
observe and take notes in research interviews
go through all the research findings together
build service maps to understand the customer experience
Content designers at Co-op gather data and evidence from many sources. We do quantitative research with tools like Google Analytics and qualitative research by listening to and observing our users. We combine this with desk research, market research and insights from focus groups – methods that we learnt from our marketing and communications roles.
“The Co-op’s Experience Library is a collection of guidelines, tools and resources to help us create better customer experiences at Co-op. Everything in it has been researched and iterated based on research findings. This means we can be confident that the advice, templates and patterns that the library provides can be used as foundations for teams to meet their colleagues’ and customers’ needs.”
‘Iterating’ means improving content in-line with regular feedback from users.
The beauty of digital content is that you can track, monitor and improve it. This is an example of iterative design and it’s a luxury that other disciplines do not have, for example, any mass-produced printed material.
Small changes can make a big difference to the reach or the impact.
In 2021, for example, we were challenged with how Co-op can support grassroots community groups beyond funding. We identified an opportunity to join up 2 different services that already exist:
Co-op Local Community Fund, which meets the need for funding
Co-operate, an online community centre, which meets the need for finding volunteers and raising awareness of their group
When applying for funding, users now promote their group on Co-operate at the same time.
One risk with joining up 2 forms was that users would promote their group on Co-operate and exit the journey – without continuing to apply for funding, which was their main goal.
To help the user, we added content at crucial points to explain where they were in the journey:
Thanks for adding your group to Co-operate
Next, apply for funding
To apply for the Co-op Local Community Fund, complete the next 8 steps.
We guided around 10,000 applicants through the form and achieved our target of onboarding all applicants to Co-operate. In this year’s iteration, we’re exploring whether using a visual to demonstrate progress helps support the content:
The fund happens every year. We’ll continue to iterate and improve on the journey each time, based on what we learn from data and evidence.
There’s still so much to learn
We’re always developing our craft as content designers and we’re still learning every day. We’re both glad we made the change to work in an environment that puts people and accessibility first.
Our Content community of practice (CoP) meets online every fortnight. If you’re a Co-op colleague and would like to join us, contact us for an invitation.
Mary Sanigar, content designer and former copywriter
Marianne Knowles, lead content designer and former marketing and communications writer
Our Co-op Experience Library is a reinvention of our design system. It’s got guidelines, tools and resources to help us create better customer and colleague experiences – things like online interactions, content guidelines, team activities and accessibility standards.
It is for anyone working on products, services and communications at Co-op. It’s not just for designers.
Although it started as a place to help digital designers create online experiences, we changed the name from Design System to the Experience Library to reflect the range of:
subjects that it includes
people who can benefit from it
How design at Co-op evolved
In 2017, when Co-op Digital was in its infancy, we launched a ‘design manual’. At the time, the Design team was growing quickly and designers were joining from very different backgrounds and had very different approaches. The design manual included the foundations, elements and components that designers need to design accessible, consistent digital products and services for Co-op – things like colours, fonts, buttons, banners, check boxes. The design manual meant that designers could focus on meeting user needs rather than on making basic design decisions. As a result we could release things faster.
Over the next year we wanted to understand how useful the design manual was for our designers, content designers and researchers. Through research, feedback and analytics, it became clear that although it was being used, it needed to be more comprehensive. In July 2018, we launched our design system which included a pattern library, a content style guide, guidance on our design thinking, principles and resources like Sketch files and brand assets.
We treated it like a digital product. We knew it would never be finished and we added to it and iterated parts when needed.
Fast forward to 2021 and the release of the Co-op Experience Library.
The design system’s focus was on ‘online’ products and services. But users don’t just interact with the online part of a service. Their end-to-end experience often includes different channels and interactions. So it makes increasing sense for the Experience Library guidance to cover more – across services and be channel agnostic.
For example, many of us write on behalf of Co-op every day. We communicate with customers, members and colleagues through lots of channels and many of them are not just online. For example, posters in stores, presentations, communicating to customers. If we talk about things in a consistent way we create familiarity. People are more likely to understand that they’re interacting with Co-op and trust us.
So we broadened our content guidelines to go beyond online journeys. And in doing so, we opened up the Experience Library to a wider audience, saving time for everyone who communicates on behalf of Co-op.
It can also help teams work better together
We work closely with the Digital Skills team. They help teams outside of digital disciplines to understand agile and design methods. They coach teams, run masterclasses and develop resources to help show the value of user-focused, iterative development and the various techniques teams can use to design and deliver products and services. At the end of the masterclasses, teams across Co-op have access to tools, activities and techniques that they can use to help them work together and solve problems.
So it makes sense for these tools, activities and techniques to be available on the Experience Library. Helping teams work together better means Co-op can make colleagues and customer experiences more effective and efficient.
And this makes sense. We are all responsible for creating value for our colleagues, our customers and the Co-op business. All our teams and business areas are interlinked at varying levels as we inevitably try to achieve these goals.
Collating these resources from across Co-op and presenting them in an open, central place, in an understandable way, enables delivery. It means colleagues can:
save time, using proven and evidenced shared standards
focus on meeting their customers’ needs
get on with their work and feel confident they’re making the good choices
learn and upskill in new areas
collaborate and, in doing so, reduce silos across businesses
have more inclusive conversations within their teams
solve problems
point to evidence which gives weight to decisions when they need to persuade stakeholders (for example, they can point to evidence that shows why abbreviations, acronyms and initialisations can be confusing)
feed back on and help improve the Experience Library
get involved and contribute to the Experience Library
And this, in turn, helps Co-op:
create coherent and accessible experiences for customers and colleagues
save time and money by operating more efficiently
become a familiar and trusted brand
increase loyalty
work in the open, and in doing so, recruit new people
Get involved
Get in touch if you work on something that could help colleagues across the business do their jobs more efficiently. This could be things like how to communicate to a particular audience, how to understand analytics, or how we can improve our sustainability.
By sharing best practices across Co-op, we make things better for our customers and colleagues.
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:
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?
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).
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.
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:
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).
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.
Experimentation – we believe that giving people permission to experiment will help us learn more, more quickly and add more value.
Humility – so that everybody feels comfortable to contribute in a blameless environment.
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.
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.
I’m Rich, I’m a Quality Analyst at Co-op in our engineering department, where I’ve been working for the last 3 and a half years. I’ve been a QA (aka Tester) for around 16 years, which when I look at it in writing makes me feel old as dust! People choose to work at Co-op for a number of reasons, but for me it happened after a friend approached me and said ‘you’ll love how we make software’.
Why QAs are different at Co-op
As a QA it’s easy to feel like your role is an afterthought in the engineering process. You build your product and then someone sits in a corner isolated and tests it, right? But after speaking to my friend and going through the interview process at Co-op, my head was turned and I learned that things were very different here.
QAs work as part of the team, right from the start. They are seen as coaches of quality and involved in the development process from the initial problem space, through to elaboration, design, development (with testing throughout) to release. Our goal is to embed quality into every stage of the development lifecycle, reduce feedback loops, and do the right thing for the right reason.
I’ve never had to sit in a corner and wait for a developer to just send a piece of work at me I had no idea about with a mandate of ‘test this’ or ‘put some automation round that’. Everybody appreciates the part testing plays and how important it is to get it right.
Part of a community
We have a number of vibrant communities within engineering that come together regularly to help better each other. We share what we are working on through show and tells, pass on knowledge with lightening talks, we have a code club (where people come together and do katas), book club, video club. I’ve never worked anywhere that has such an inclusive collaborative approach to software development.
As a rule, we mob – this is where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer. I spend a lot of my time as a QA challenging developers as to why we are taking a certain approach, getting them to ask each other ‘are we doing the right thing here?’.
Something to be proud of
When I first joined Co-op, I was working on our funeral arrangement application for our frontline Funeralcare colleagues. Our team’s job was to make software and implement features that made our colleagues’ jobs easier – saving them time which they could better use to support grieving families.
This was amplified even more in recent times due to the challenges faced because of the pandemic. The new app features that the team delivered for our colleagues during this time were vital to their roles and to keeping our colleagues safe. Throughout the peak of the pandemic our core application had zero down time, something we can be extremely proud of.
Looking forwards
For me personally, Co-op is a fantastic company to work for, because our purpose is much more than just making money. We’re dedicated to building a greener future, to helping local communities, charitable causes, and having a genuine commitment to diversity and inclusion.
We make software the right way, for the right reasons. And I’m lucky to work with some superbly talented, kind and thoughtful people in a place where everyone can be their true self.
We’re hiring at the moment – so to see all of our new vacancies and register for job alerts click the button below.
I’m Gemma Cameron, the Engineering Practice Lead. I look after the Engineering Practice and Community; making sure we have great engineers at Co-op. We’re going to be sharing more content about the products and services we’re working on throughout 2022, but from more of a technical angle. They’ll be a little different to what we’ve previously shared on the Co-op Digital blog, but just as insightful. All of our Engineering blog posts will be tagged in the engineering category, so you can easily find them too.
Engineers play a huge part in our Technology team.
Our community is made up of Quality Analysts, Frontend, Software and Platform Engineers who work remotely from all over the UK (or in our Manchester / Eastleigh offices if they chose to). We work collaboratively in multi-disciplinary, agile product teams and currently have around 60 engineers across 15 different teams.
In our Mega CoP, we have an update from our Head of Engineering Danielle Haugedal-Wilson, lots of breaks for cups of tea, breakout sessions, lightning talks, and group chats. The group chats are a recent addition from us all working remotely. With small groups of 6 or so engineers, which changes every month, we get to know each other and what we’re working on. This helps us connect across the community on a more personal level, and helps put names to faces. We do this over Microsoft Teams and tend to use Slack more for chatting asynchronously.
Looking back on 2021
As the year closes, we celebrated our last Engineering Community of Practice get-together on 17 December. We wore our festive hats, we had a panto, a brew and a natter, some coding fun and even poetry! All entirely remote.
Join us at Co-op
We’re currently hiring Engineering Managers to join our community, so if you’re an experienced engineer who wants to concentrate on career coaching (line management), recruitment and technical training of teams, click here to find out more and apply. This is an engineering leadership role where you’ll also be involved in shaping and setting the strategy and direction for Engineering at our Co-op.
We’re growing our Engineering community in 2022, and are looking to hire over 50 new colleagues from apprentice up to leadership level. If you’re interested in working with us, head over to our Work With Us page to see what’s available right now, or fill in this form to register your interest and we’ll let you know when new roles are advertised.
This time last year, I think we all imagined that working from home so regularly would be temporary. But here we are, a year on. The Digital Product and Design team is not fully remote like we were for most of 2020, but we are a remote-first team now.
Although this has had its downsides, we’ve navigated the shift well. We’ve continued to iterate our processes and adapt our tools and, if anything, we’ve become a more flexible, pragmatic, impactful team. This hasn’t been easy though, and while we’ve continued to deliver for Co-op customers and members, we’ve also had to deliver for each other. We check in with each other more often to help balance the stresses and strains of the outside world with the ones inside Co-op.
Our colleague happiness survey, Talkback, shows 90% of colleagues feel they can have open and honest conversations; 95% of people feel we have an environment where they can be themselves, and 98% feel their manager role-models a healthy balance between their work and home life. These results reflect the open, honest culture we strive to create – we all contribute to this culture, so we can all be proud.
To everyone in the Digital Product and Design team, and to all our close collaborators across Engineering, Delivery and the wider Co-op, thank you for all your hard work and kindness this year. It’s been tough but rewarding, and there’s a lot to look forward to in 2022.
In Operational Innovation we use technology to simplify tasks for Food store colleagues.
After months of remote research, we’ve loved getting back into stores and speaking to colleagues in person ❤️
This year we:
released several improvements to the Date Code app, reducing the number of date checks colleagues need to carry out
launched the News and Mags app, to save 2.7 million sheets of paper and reduce leakage in newspaper and magazine returns
started new discoveries into the even more thorny store problems such as leakage, colleague safety, and deliveries
We also became a permanent part of the Retail Support Centre following the end of the Leading the way programme. Thank you to all our colleagues past and present who helped us get here!
We’ve used search engine optimisation (SEO) and experimentation to improve user journeys, get more people to the site and meet business goals across Co-op. We’ve:
used a/b testing to deliver £6 million in incremental revenue
helped 26,000 new members sign-up
increased web enquiries by 7,000
understood what people are searching for to increase traffic from unpaid sources (organic sources) by 40%
used a Google Maps location management tool to generate 20,000 new calls a month for Funeralcare
And in 2022 we want to do even more using paid activity, store roll-outs and bolder tests that will give us more insights.
We’ve built, maintained and enhanced Co-op’s digital foundations
This includes:
designing and building our own blog on coop.co.uk to make it easier and quicker for us to update and maintain – saving Co-op money and improving our search engine optimisation performance
making our cookie banner clearer and more transparent for users so they can make informed choices
changing and improving how and where we host coop.co.uk making it scalable, quicker and more reliable
Our new blog on coop.co.uk
We’ve launched the Experience Library
Our Experience Library
The Co-op Experience Library is a collection of guidelines, tools and resources to help us create better customer experiences at Co-op.
It’s a reinvention of the Co-op Design System, iterated based on what we’ve learnt from colleagues. By understanding how the design system was being used we were able to:
learn what was missing and focus on what was needed
work with other experts, teams and business units to include a broader range of topics, for example new accessibility and search engine optimisation sections
communicate in the open, share what we’re doing and regularly get feedback from colleagues
It also helped us prioritise what to work on next: form guidelines and patterns.
The Digital Engagement and Loyalty portfolio (previously Member and Customer) re-organised ourselves this year, adding Co-operate to the fold and building a new team around improving the membership experience. We’re now 5 product teams (Co-op App, Personalised Offers, Co-op Account, Co-operate and Membership Experience) working to make Co-op a brand that inspires loyalty.
We’ve delivered valuable features… including the most-requested feature in our app reviews (adding your membership card to your digital wallet), an easier way to become a member (paying via Apple/Google) and ensuring Co-op Accounts are accessible to all (earning a zero issues report in testing).
We’ve contributed to the success of the wider business… by delivering millions in incremental sales via the personalised offers programme, driving 10% of ecommerce sales via a new in-app promo, and making it easier to checkout online, so that signed-in users spend more and convert 35% more often.
We’ve helped deliver Co-op’s vision of co-operating for a fairer world by making it easy for 1.2 million members to select a local cause to support with just one click. We’ve also:
connected the Local Community Fund with Co-operate, our online community centre, to help more than 10,000 local groups apply for funding and access wider support
introduced a new volunteering service to help people find opportunities locally
encouraged almost 250,000 people to engage in communities
showcased relevant opportunities to participate and support our community missions locally
Our new volunteering service
And we’ve paid down important technical debt… by switching our identity provider (a huge endeavour that’s reduced fraud, whilst causing barely a ripple to the user experience) and introducing a new Membership API Gateway that makes the way we share membership information easier to maintain, more secure and quicker to extend when new opportunities arise.
Looking forwards to 2022 we’ve been working with our stakeholders across the business to set shared objectives and priorities. We’ve been using decision stacks to unite teams from different areas (including marketing, commercial, CRM, and data science) around a set of priorities with KPIs that we think will have the greatest impact. It’s been fun to work with colleagues with different perspectives and build diverse thinking and expertise into our plans.
Customer Experience Strategy team
We set up the Customer Experience (CX) Strategy team. We’ve been well-received so far.
“As well as CX strategists, the CX Strategy team is made up of experts in content strategy, research and service design.”
This is 👌🏻 CX in many orgs, particularly in housing, is often so misunderstood and doesn’t consider service design or content strategy. More info 👇🏻 https://t.co/CYUDwUsyWL
We identified the funeral arrangement to probate journey as somewhere we could prove the value of our CX strategy. Why? Because you never need one without the other. So, we moved probate to the right place in the online Funeralcare journey and improved the content.
Comparing the 16 weeks since the content went live to the previous 16 weeks, there has been:
49% increase in probate leads
50% increase in bookings (where we quote for probate)
55% increase in number of probate sales – an extra £140k per year
Enabling teams to move from strategy to delivery
We’ve been supporting teams in the wider organisation to adopt a customer experience approach to designing services. We’ve been documenting them too so that guidance and support will be available after we leave the project.
We’ve co-designed various tools with Co-op Powerincluding:
A service design toolkit for the Power product development team
A product definition canvas focused on customer needs
Here’s the service design toolkit for Co-op Power
Working with Nisa to connect business and experience strategies
We improved the customer experience for Nisa’s independent retailers (Co-op acquired Nisa in 2018). Our work is a good example of building a vision framework based on a detailed understanding of how customers interact with Nisa across each touchpoint. Ultimately, a customer’s experience is the sum of all the individual decisions the business makes, the systems they use and the processes they follow. Thanks to everyone who has been involved in helping us learn about, understand and improve each tiny part.
Image shows the connection between principles, recommendation, strategic priorities and the experience vision.
Customer Experience Day events
We marked CX Day 2021 with a series of CX best practice talks covering Insurance, Funeralcare and Food. Across 3 days, over 200 colleagues watched the sessions showing there’s an appetite from colleagues across Co-op to learn more about what customer experience is, why it’s important and how it can be improved for our members, customers and colleagues.
A screengrab from one of the events
Co-op Legal Services
This year our focus has been on optimisation.
We have redesigned our Co-op Wills Writing service using web analytics, data from our existing platform, and user research with the aim of improving conversion rates and reducing lead times. We are launching soon and estimate that the time spent drafting a will be reduced by up to 1 hour.
We also created a new digital lasting power of attorney service (not publicly available at the moment).
Customer Platform Service team
This year, we restructured, and we’ve made great progress in re-branding and simplifying processes and tools like our Statuspage, Service Catalogue, Runbooks and Impact matrices to optimise how we work.
This year we’re proud of the work we’ve done to:
Introduce standard change which means we have cut manual effort to review and approve changes by up to 70%. Our Change success rate across all products was 98.6%!
Offer 24/7 support for Food eCommerce web-platform and Funeralcare customers
Reduce costs by approximately £50K by decommissioning the archaic server for Membership wallet
achieve a record run of 110 consecutive days without a major incident in some products! Work in Problem Management ensured a reduction in major incidents by 32% compared to 2020.
Nasir Qureshi and Poonum Bhana, Service analysts
Inclusive meeting guidelines
In 2021, many organisations have been hybrid working. This is probably why our ‘inclusive meeting guidelines’ resonated with so many people. We wrote them to try and improve the way we collaborate in person and remotely. Read more on why and how we created them.
Jake’s tweet generated over 30,000 engagements including many industry heavyweights like Lauren Currie and Andy Budd.
Here it is! 🎉 Something I've been working on over the past few months with some brilliant colleagues. We've created 7 guidelines to ensure meetings are #inclusive at @coopuk. Read the blog and download the digital posters here: https://t.co/dTyzAl7sGqpic.twitter.com/nxAJfMd0se
There are now 1,600 Co-op Food stores that accept online orders through our ecommerce site, shop.coop.co.uk This time last year, only 760 of our stores were taking part, up from 32 stores in 2019.
Given the increase in numbers of participating stores, it’s not surprising that 2021 has been busy. We:
made it easier for shoppers to see which products are included in deals
made it possible for the Merchandising team to edit product titles and descriptions
added a ‘Top deals’ page
added a contact form to the site to help customers report order issues saving our contact centre colleagues time
made it possible for shoppers to use Apple Pay on service
made stock availability visible to customers and offered alternatives on out-of-stock products
trialled ‘delivery within an hour’
still maintain crucial operational services like Shifts and How Do I for our colleagues
Our shop.coop.co.uk page showing some of the top deals
Funeralcare’s Core Transformation and Guardian team
Guardian is our colleague-facing digital service. We designed and built it in-house so our Funeralcare colleagues could spend less time on administrative tasks and more time with clients. Since its roll-out in 2018, we’ve supported the maintainance and we’ve continued to listen to colleagues and support the great work they do by iterating Guardian. This year, improvements include:
Adding a Contract transfer system so colleagues can manage the collection of someone who has died from the police and hospitals. The system also makes sure each party is invoiced correctly.
More accurate tracking of ashes so funeral directors can check the deceased’s ashes are collected within mandatory 3 days and reduce administration overhead.
Creating a Direct Cremation functionality so colleagues can easily track whether the mandatory cremation paperwork is complete
Our team has also replaced existing architecture to connect the website front-end to the new Microsoft product supporting the Funeralcare strategic systems upgrade programme known as ‘core transformation’.
Funeralcare’s Customer team
Image shows the pay for a funeral service
This year, we’ve created:
a new online payment journey that has allowed over 2,500 clients to pay their funeral balance online, saving both clients and Funeralcare colleagues time
a new regulatory compliant online pricing component on 900 branch pages allowing clients to understand and compare local Funeralcare prices
a trial to help understand how we can help clients make appointments with branches, through the website
User research was at the heart of all our work again, with some emotional sessions. All participants reassured us they want to help us make services better and enjoyed the research, tears and all.
We’ve also changed a lot in 2021 – halfway through the year we introduced an entirely new engineering team.
Responsible design: more important than ever
Over the past decade, digital delivery teams have adopted the mindset of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ and we’ve reached a point where a lot has broken. We’ve spoken a lot over the years about designing the right thing in the right way, but we need to keep adapting and changing what ‘the right way’ means in the context of the challenges we face in our communities and globally. We’re having more conversations around ‘responsible’ design and this will continue to be at the forefront of our minds going into 2022.
Last week, the product and design team attended Design Council’s 2-day event Design for Planet which coincided with the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, and our Co-op26 campaign. The purpose of the event was to galvanise the UK’s design community to address the climate emergency and sustainability issues.
Coming together with a wider Design community (albeit virtually) felt important after 18 months of remote working and being relatively inward-facing within Co-op. The collaboration and idea sharing was inspiring and the discussions that were sparked were important ones.
Over the past decade, digital delivery teams have adopted the mindset of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ and we’ve reached a point where a lot has broken. We need to be more responsible when we design products and services, and the team learnt how we (as designers and product people) can help tackle the biggest challenge of our time.
Design, after all, can be a powerful agent for positive change.
Designing in the ‘right’ way
We’ve spoken a lot over the years about designing the right thing in the right way, but we need to keep adapting and changing what ‘the right way’ means in the context of the challenges we face in our communities and globally.
Last week’s event prompted us to think harder about what we can do to make our working practices and processes better so that ultimately, we can design more responsibly, more mindfully, more sustainably and keep ethical considerations at the forefront (of course, we already have Co-op values to guide our work). If we get this right, we can make things better now, but also in the future.
Diverse expertise. One shared mission
‘Design for Planet’ is an all-encompassing name for an event which gave platforms to specialists from many different areas of expertise. For example:
Economist Kate Raworth and architect Indy Johar spoke about the need for systemic change, using Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ model that highlights how unsustainable unchecked growth is.
Designer Finn Harries spoke about the importance of storytelling in reframing the climate crisis and our relationship to nature.
Andy Hyde, user researcher Anna Horton and service designer Aurelie Lionet talked about the need for ensuring a ‘just transition’ when designing low carbon journeys to ensure we don’t exclude or disadvantage people in the process.
Despite speaking on vastly different topics, they all share a very similar mission: to make the planet better for everyone and everything that lives on it now, and in the future.
We’re aiming for that too and we kept this mission in mind when we were thinking about where we can improve.
What we’re going to do
We have a Slack channel brimming with ideas about how to address some of the issues that already exist and how to safeguard sustainable design. We’ve already agreed on several actions as well as some things we’ll be looking into more:
Introduce sustainability champions (hi Siobhan Harris, who is our first). Champions will raise awareness and nudge people into thinking about sustainability more consistently and at each point a significant decision must be made. The aim is to keep it at the forefront of all our minds.
Revisit our design principles and add a sustainability-related one. It will likely focus on longevity and designing products, services and experiences that work well and last, as well as creating less content.
Continue to encourage people from the wider business to use our Experience Library so we do less, but we do it better and to a certain, ‘good’ standard.
Investigate how we can change our ways of working to collect less and delete more data, as soon as its not needed. There is too much tech data waste and we need to be more mindful. Particularly since working remotely, many teams record and store sessions for people to watch back, but we should look at how often they are actually watched and how long we store them for.
Encourage colleagues to minimise using video bandwidth by doing things like talk and walk phone calls, instead of video meetings. This could cut carbon emissions of the call by 96%.
Look at how we can design for ‘endings’ – for example, when a service is no longer needed, used or supported. Leaving it live is irresponsible because it takes up space on the internet and often contributes to ‘link rot’ (meaning it’s likely to link to old, out of date pages).
Prioritise and continue our discussions on climate change. The service design and visual design communities of practice had a structured debate about some of the topics that came up at the Design for Planet event.
Plus, lots of us have also signed up for UnGifted Secret Santa for “climate-friendly, socially-distanced colleagues who want to gift unforgettable surprises instead of unwanted stuff.”
It’s a good start and we’re still learning. It’s good to be pushing these considerations and questions forward at Co-op – a place that has values that already very much support a ‘better’ way. We know that we can’t just do things better, we need to be doing better things too. As a team we’ll be pushing the wider Co-op business to use design thinking and digital ways of working to make big shifts in the products and services we offer.
