Design – Co-op Digital Blog

An accessibility audit for the Co-op Insurance website

July 5, 2019Co-op1 Comment

This is a guest post about co-opinsurance.co.uk – a product developed by a team within Co-op Insurance. The author is Paul Braddock, an interaction designer who works on it.

There are a lot of reasons for checking and improving how accessible co-opinsurance.co.uk is. In the crudest terms, it makes good business sense: the more people who don’t find it frustrating to use, the more potential customers we have.

But the purpose of accessible design is far more than making a sale.

AbilityNet estimate there are 19.1 million people in the UK who may have physical, cognitive, visual or hearing impairments that could affect how they interact with the world online. Equality is one of Co-op’s values and it states all members should have the opportunity to be involved. Being inclusive is part of what we do at Co-op and it’s what we strive for in our design.

With this in mind we commissioned a technical accessibility audit of the site. This post is about the recommendations made, how we’re tackling them and the effect we hope setting a standard will have on our partners.

Defining the scope

Our data analyst Nick Jones looked at the site’s traffic and identified the most common user journeys we see on co-opinsurance.co.uk He also pulled out our most frequently used page templates so that if one of those wasn’t accessible, fixing it would mean we could fix a lot relatively quickly.

We worked on 10 sample website pages with AbilityNet who would be checking to see if the pages comply with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). To get the most value from the audit testing was carried out using JAWS for desktop and Talkback for Android, across all major browsers including Chrome, IE11 and Firefox.

Issues identified

Across the 10 pages, AbilityNet found 18 issues which would affect people who use assistive technology to navigate our website. They estimate 3.8 million people in the UK use assistive technology such as screen readers. They also identified issues that would impact 2.3 million people in the UK who may have difficulty seeing the screen.

Of the 18 issues, they deemed 3 to be ‘high priority’ because aria labels were not in place so screen readers would not read out:

Icons in tables.
Dropdown options in our live chat feature.
Our sticky ‘Live chat’ button.

Here’s an example of a table we use on the site.

The ticks and crosses are the icons that weren’t announced to users. For example, the ticks and crosses in the table shows that platinum multi-trip insurance includes cruise cover but bronze, silver and gold don’t. However, a screen reader would have announced, “platinum blank column 5”. Not only are the icons not compatible with screen readers, we hadn’t made the information available elsewhere on the page.

Here’s a screenshot of issue 2: live chat dropdown options.

The live chat window has a drop down so that users can indicate what they’d like help with. But screen readers don’t announce it, so users are at risk of not knowing what the options are. This would have a major impact on our users who are dependent on using live chat as a preferred method of contact.

And below is how the sticky live chat button looks (issue 3).

With our live chat feature, neither the label or the fact it is a button is announced by a screen reader. Which means that screen reader users may not know that the button and method of contact exists.

How we’re fixing them

AbilityNet also gave recommendations on how to fix the issues they identified. Our content, design and developer teams are now in the process of fixing the 18 issues that were identified and taking what we learnt from the audit and applying the fixes across the whole of co-opinsurance.co.uk

The content team were able to fix their issues straight away, as only minor tweaks to aria labels where required for certain products. James Martin has development fixes in progress and these changes will form part of a future code release. We’ve also been speaking with the external team who built our live chat and to make sure the problems that were identified are prioritised for their future releases.

Hoping to influence good behaviour

The audit was just for co-opinsurance.co.uk – that’s what we own and manage. However, our ‘quote and buy’ journeys are owned and managed by our underwriting partners so once a user clicks ‘get a quote’, their online journey passes over to a partner’s site.

Just like the issues that were identified with our live chat, we can’t necessarily fix them but we can influence them. We are therefore in the process of creating a ‘standard’, similar to a set of guidelines, that would cover our expectations and best practices when it comes to accessibility for our partners. This could eventually be fed into our Design system if we believe it brings value to other areas of the Co-op.

We recognise that inclusive design is a process so we are taking additional steps in our ways of working to make sure that we don’t exclude people when they come to our website:

by including accessibility checks in our quality assurance process when publishing new content or doing development improvements
using open source tools such as Accessibility Insights and Lighthouse to check co-opinsurance.co.uk on a quarterly basis
recruiting Co-op members with accessibility issues for our user research – if you would like to get involved email: gidigital@co-opinsurance.co.uk

Paul Braddock
Designer from Co-op Insurance

Pair writing clear, accurate content for ‘How do I’

March 15, 2019Co-op1 Comment

This week, the design team held a show and tell to discuss 2 questions:

What is design?
Why should you care?

We’ve been posting some of the examples from different areas of design that we talked about. The posts are aimed at Co-op colleagues whose expertise are in something other than a digital discipline.

Today we’re looking at how pair writing played a huge role in the success of How do I.

In November 2017 we launched How do I so that all Food store colleagues could find out how to do something in their store quickly and easily. ‘How do I’ is a website with up-to-date policies and procedures on it, written in a clear, user-focused way.

It’s all down to great collaboration

To meet colleague and business needs, the guidance on procedures needed to be:

Clearly written and easy to understand.
Accurate and legally compliant.

There wasn’t one set of people with the correct skills to make sure the content did both these things. We needed content designers who are skilled in writing and presenting content for the web, and we needed subject matter experts such as policy owners – in other words people who know their stuff.

Forms and surveys specialist Caroline Jarrett puts it brilliantly here:

If you know enough to say it’s correct, you know too much to say it’s clear. No one can judge both clear and correct.

— Caroline Jarrett (@cjforms) March 8, 2016

Over 6 months we reworded, reformatted and redesigned over 500 Co-op Food store policies and procedures for our store colleagues. The technique we used, in various formats, was pair writing.

What pair writing is and how you do it

It’s as simple as it sounds. Pair writing is when a content designer and a subject matter expert bring their skills and knowledge together to write content that works for users. Working together, on the same thing, at the same time speeds up the process of getting content live because feedback is in real time.

Pair writing best practice

While working on How Do I, content designers from Co-op Digital spent hours pair writing with subject matter experts from the Food business. Here’s what we found worked best.

Our set up

Sitting together allows you to talk and listen, question and clarify without distraction. We found that although this worked well in front of one person’s computer, it worked even better if the pair could take a laptop into a quieter place because the technique often needs quite intense concentration. We found 2 hours was enough and we swapped who was writing every 30 minutes.

If you have access to Google Documents, you can work in the same document at the same time from your respective computers. If you do this, make sure only one person is typing at a time, and you’re constantly thinking out loud and discussing what’s being written so that you’re both pulling in the same direction.

Talking in real time is what matters

Sometimes it’s not possible to get together in person but that’s ok, you can pair write from afar. The important thing is that you’re getting time together to talk and share your understanding. For How Do I, we had regular phone or video calls with depot managers across the country to create content. It’s also crucial that you remember to get something written down – it doesn’t have to be perfect and it’s never finished. You can come back later and tidy it up.

Our process

We started by setting some ‘acceptance criteria’, in other words, deciding which questions we wanted the content to answer. It’s important to do this so you know when you’re happy for the content to go live. It’s so easy to find yourself in an endless loop of feedback and tweaks until it’s ‘perfect’.
We agreed a sign off process. The content designer signed off on clarity, the subject matter expert signed off on accuracy.
We then looked at the existing content and asked if it did the job. In most cases the information was already there but it was hard to find, hard to read and not structured in a useful way. Together we cut out the unnecessary stuff.
We simplified and reworded once we had the bare bones of what we absolutely needed to include. It’s the content designer’s job to pull out tricky, unfamiliar words and replace with language that research has shown to reflect the words people use.
We tackled the order we should present content in. Together we prioritised information and reformatted it. We figured out the ‘important’ stuff based on the way someone would complete the task in store, how frequently something was asked and whether there were legal compliance issues.

When both of us were happy with what we’d got down, we gave it to Digital and Food colleagues to make sure the content was usable and addressed the user needs we’d developed. Don’t leave it too long before sharing and give a deadline for feedback so colleagues don’t slow down the process. We reacted to feedback and redrafted together if we needed to.

Lengthy detail to task-based content

Together we transformed a copy-heavy page of information on restricted sales into several, task-based chunks of content. Research told us that when store colleagues wanted guidance on selling a restricted item, they would naturally search for the thing that they were about to sell. We left out the unnecessary information and instead gave colleagues the exact information they needed to complete the task.

How pair writing has influenced outcomes

Pair writing has helped us redesign, reformat and reword over 500 policies and procedures for Co-op Food stores.

It’s enabled us to develop content that all colleagues (not just managers) can quickly scan to help carry out a task. They feel empowered. We’ve seen a reduction in time that colleagues spend looking for information and it’s helped to save money too. Calls to our Food store helplines went down by around 40% in some stores, contributing to a saving of over £300k per year.

Human to human – an extra benefit

Building a relationship with a colleague in person, or at least in real time on a call, builds empathy and breaks down barriers unintentionally set in place by businesses. Subject matter experts have come to me for further writing support because they know what I look like – this is less likely to happen if you’ve only ever spoken on email. They’re also now sharing their content, helping to eliminate unnecessary duplication of work and speed up sign-off processes.

Working collaboratively

If everyone shares an understanding of the benefits of being design-led, it’ll be easier for experts from around the business to work together to deliver value to Co-op customers, colleagues and the Co-op as a business. If you didn’t make the show and tell but would like to find out more, email Katherine Wastell, Head of Design.

Matt Edwards
Content designer

Field research: designing pre-paid plans with Funeralcare

March 14, 2019March 14, 2019Co-op

This week, the design team held a show and tell to discuss 2 questions:

What is design?
Why should you care?

If you couldn’t make it, we’re writing up some of the examples from different areas of design that we talked about and we’re posting them on the blog this week. They’re aimed at Co-op colleagues whose expertise are in something other than a digital discipline.

Today we’re looking at how we used field research when we were designing a digital form with Funeralcare colleagues who arrange pre-paid funeral plans in our branches. (You can also make a pre-paid funeral plan online).

Buying a pre-paid funeral plan: how the paper forms process works

Here’s how the process tends to work:

a client rings a local branch to make an appointment
the client goes into a branch
a colleague and the client fill out a lengthy paper form together
the client pays at least a deposit to their local branch
3 copies of the paper form are made – one for the client, one is kept in branch and the other is sent by post to head office which often takes 7 days
a colleague at head office manually copies the information from the paper form into a customer relationship management system
the form is dug out on the request of the client’s family after their loved one has died

The process is expensive, time-consuming and as with all human processes, there is room for error.

What we wanted to achieve

We wanted to create a more efficient, easy-to-use service. We wanted to connect the computer systems that are already being used in Co-op Funeralcare branches and integrate them directly with the customer relationship management system colleagues use in head office.

Where to start?

What we knew was limited. We had an idea what the start of the process was for clients and colleagues because we knew what the paper form looked like. We also had sales data from the very end of the process. But in order to improve efficiency and ease of use, we needed to know a lot more about how things are working in between these 2 points.

For both colleagues and clients we wanted to get a clearer picture of:

what a plan-making appointment was like (both practically and emotionally)
the paper form filling process
whether there were frustrations with the process and where they were

We arranged some site visits for our ‘field research’.

Learning from field research

We visited Co-op Funeralcare branches.

Why? Because when people feel at ease they’re more likely to open up and speak honestly. For this reason we spoke to our funeral arranger colleagues in a context they’re familiar with – in the rooms where they regularly create plans with clients. Talking to them here helped them relax, and because they weren’t in a place where their seniors might overhear, they were less guarded than they might be if we brought them into head office.

Seeing mistakes happen, figuring out why they happen

Talking to them was good but seeing colleagues fill out the paper plans was invaluable because we could observe:

the order they approached the questions
whether they made mistakes and where
if and where they used any common work-arounds where the form didn’t meet their needs

All of this helps us see where we can improve the design.

Feeding observations into the design

When we were talking through the paper forms with arrangers, they told us they often found there wasn’t enough space to capture a client’s personal requests. Because they’d come up with a reasonable work-around, it might not have been something they would have mentioned to us if we hadn’t been there, in their office, looking at the forms together. Being there helped us make sure we didn’t miss this. They showed us examples of when they had worked around a lack of space by attaching an extra sheet to the paper form they were submitting.

In the example below the client has requested to be dressed in ‘Everton blue gown with frill’ and they’ve been very particular about the music before, during and after the service.

Every funeral is different – just like every life they commemorate and the paper form didn’t accommodate for the level of detail needed. The work-around they’d come up with wasn’t hugely painful but good design is making processes pain free. We fed our observations back to the digital team and designed a form that allowed for individuality. It has bigger open text boxes to record more detail as well as including drop downs and free text boxes for music on the day.

Paper versus digital forms

The benefits of moving across to digital forms include:

Having easier access to more data, for example, numbers on couples buying together and numbers on people buying for someone else. This is useful because we can direct our efforts into improving the experience where the most people need it.
Saving time for colleagues who manually copy paper plans to the head office system. Digital plans are sent directly to system and are instantly visible to colleagues in head office.
Reducing the number of errors in paper plans. Common mistakes include allowing people over 80 to spread their payment over instalments and the client’s choice of cremation or burial not being recorded. The design of the digital form doesn’t allow arrangers to progress if there are mistakes like these.
A significant yearly saving on stamps used to send paper forms from a branch to head office.

Field research helped get us to this point

We’re now testing the new digital forms in 15 branches. We’ll be rolling them out to more and more branches over time but we’re starting small so we can iron out any cracks.

So far, the feedback from colleagues is positive. But without observing colleagues in context, there’s a certain amount of assumption about the way they work on our part. Field research contributes to the fact the pre-paid funeral plan service is design-led.

Gillian MacDonald
User researcher

Karen Lindop: we’re hiring! Plus news from our latest All Team

June 29, 2018Co-op

(Transcript) Karen Lindop: Hello, and welcome to our update on what’s happening in the Digital team. Busy week this week.

On Wednesday all the team got together to share their work. It was great to have lots of the team members on their feet and talking about the work their doing. We heard all about digital coupons; our Design system; service design with our Food business; how we’re using our data ethics canvas; plans for one web and celebrating award success. Thanks to everyone who presented.

We’re looking for some new people to join us right now. We’re expanding the work on Funeralcare Guardian, and because of this we’re looking for product owner, delivery manager, BA, software engineer, platform engineer, QA, user researcher and interaction designer. If you, or you know anyone who might be interested then please get in touch.

You can also find out more about the Guardian roll-out and lessons learned on our Digital blog.

Also this week, some of our interaction designers have been involved in OH’s Catalyst programme – a 10-day alternative education programme for people looking to get their foot in the door of the creative and digital industry. Katherine Wastell and Jack Fletcher took part in a panel discussion about their design career paths. Then together with Nate Langley they all led a session called ‘Everyone is a designer’, which focussed on turning research findings into product opportunities.

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to subscribe for all our updates on our blog and follow us on Twitter. See you soon.

Karen Lindop
Head of Digital Operations

5 things we learnt that helped us build the ‘How do I’ service

January 18, 2018January 19, 2018Co-op

We’ve recently launched ‘How do I’ – a service that helps colleagues in Co-op Food stores find out how to complete store tasks and procedures in the right way. We built it based on months of research with our Food store colleagues.

Here are 5 things we learnt that challenged our assumptions and helped us create a service that’s based on the needs of the people who use it:

1.The most frequent tasks aren’t the most searched for

In web design it usually makes sense to prioritise the most common tasks – those which affect the most people, most often. So, for food stores you could assume that might be putting a card payment through the till or putting stock out correctly – the tasks which have to be done frequently.

But we found that the majority of our colleagues had become so familiar with these tasks that they didn’t need to check the detail. It was, of course, the infrequent tasks that our users needed to check – the tasks they only have to do occasionally and need to check the detail of what’s involved.

So, we created a service that prioritised the things we knew colleagues needed to check.

2.People don’t want to rely on those around them for their development

We saw that most colleagues were confident asking for help and were used to learning by being shown. We assumed that this was the best way for colleagues to learn.

However, we found that this takes at least 2 people’s time, colleagues often felt like they were pestering the other person and it’s not always the best way of relaying information – people were sometimes passing on bad habits.

We found that it can be especially frustrating if you’re relying on a manager for information, for instance if you’re trying to learn new procedures to get a promotion. Managers are often busy with other tasks and responsibilities:

I’m going to the manager all the time – that’s why it’s taking me so long. It’d be quicker if I could have gone somewhere to look myself.

– Customer team member training to become a team leader

So we built a service that allows colleagues to be self-sufficient and responsible for their own development.

3.Managers are users too

We assumed that the audience who would benefit most from a service like this would be customer team members (rather than managers). They were our largest audience and those who were often newest to Co-op.

But, we learnt that those who were new into a management role also felt especially vulnerable. As their responsibility increased, so did the assumption from their colleagues that they immediately knew everything:

Going from customer team member to team leader is a massive jump. It can be quite daunting and hard to get to grip with everything that has to be done.

– New team leader

So we made a service that could help give new managers confidence at the time they need it most.

4.People with specialisms can feel disempowered

In some of the larger stores, colleagues tended to have responsibility for their own area, for example, the cash office, newspaper and magazines or the tills. They were experts in their areas and knew the processes inside out. We assumed these colleagues would have little need to use the service.

But, we learnt that their specialism often meant that they were:

nervous covering shifts in different parts of the store
unable to cover certain shifts
lacked confidence applying for overtime opportunities in different stores

If I went to a smaller store I wouldn’t know what to do. I feel disadvantaged because I don’t know how to do things.

– Customer team member in a large store

So we created a service where colleagues can access any information they want, from computers in any store, and get the knowledge they need to go for other opportunities.

5.Putting information on a website isn’t always the answer

Co-op has a lot of health and safety policies and procedures. A lot. Many people thought that the ‘How do I’ website would be the best place to put all that information. But, just because something is a procedure for Co-op Food store staff, doesn’t mean the website’s the right place to put that content, especially if we want colleagues to pay attention to it.

For information to be useful, it needs to be available at the point it’s needed.

For example, amongst the health and safety procedures are things like how to wash your hands properly after preparing food. We learnt that people would be more receptive to the information if it was a poster positioned near the sink. It wasn’t effective it to put information like that on a website – people’s hands were dirty and they rarely had a computer nearby (if they did, it didn’t cross their mind to check it in that situation).
So, we made a service that’s based on an understanding of the what the user’s doing and where they are at that point of completing a task.

Don’t assume. Learn.

When creating ‘How do I’ we:

were open-minded
tested our assumptions
made mistakes
were proven wrong

By understanding who our users are and what they need, we’re able to build a service that can help them, rather than a service based on reckons, assumptions and guesses.
And it doing so we were able to focus on the things that were important – our users.

Joanne Schofield
Content designer

Do you want to work with us to design content that puts users first? We’re hiring content designers.

Posters. They’re part of our culture

September 13, 2017September 15, 2017Co-op2 Comments

Arch_Principle_4

Our workspace in Federation House is shiny and new, open-plan and airy, and best of all it reflects our teams’ progress. Whiteboards show what we’re working on now and what’s coming next – they’re chocker with post-its.

But we’re also beginning to fill our walls with posters. Instead of showing work in progress, our posters show off overarching ideas, ones that don’t change from sprint to sprint.

We posted about our 10 Architecture Principles back in April. We’ve since made them into a series of posters. Putting them up reminds us how we’ve agreed to work and makes our workspace ours.

They’re up! Working with @GailMellows, @MrsDHW and @CQuin a joy and a pleasure pic.twitter.com/oDLQRbxtv4

— Ella Fitzsimmons (@fitzsimple) August 9, 2017

Posters: words by Ella Fitzsimmons, design by Gail Mellows.

Co-op Digital team

A new website: 12 months of digital product research

April 28, 2017May 2, 20176 Comments

The Digital Product Research team builds things to think with. Over the last year we’ve researched a number of areas, and we’ve brought what we’ve learned from that work together in a new website: coop.uk/dpr.

Building and testing quickly

Starting from an idea about how we think the world works, or how we’d like it to work, we carry out experiments to find out if we were right, or why we were wrong. We quickly test and validate our ideas in a wide range of ways including making physical gadgets, building web apps, giving out flyers, knocking on doors, even experimenting on ourselves.

Stuff that matters

Whatever we do, we always start from one of our core beliefs:

people should understand and have control over the technology they use
technology should work for people and communities, not against them

And we’re always looking for new places where co-operation is a competitive advantage. Over the last year we’ve explored a few areas including insurance, financial freedom and community energy. And we’ve talked about some of it – we’ve blogged about some of our work on paperless billing, terms and conditions and security.

A place for our learnings to live

We’ve amassed a collection of learnings, ideas, prototypes and insights which we’ve brought together into one archive: coop.uk/dpr. Some of what we’ve learned along the way seems quite obvious (young people find it hard to visualise the long term future – who knew!).

Some are more surprising (an interest in renewable energy ≠ an interest in climate change). But we think we have some interesting stories to tell – not just about what we’ve learned, but also about how we’ve learned.

So please take a look, and let us know what you think. Specifically we’d like to know if the site is accessible – we’ve carried out some automated tests, but that’s no substitute for getting it in front of people.

And, of course, we’d like to know if you think it’s interesting.

If you’d have any questions about our work, let us know in the comments.

Sophy Colbert
Content designer

Transforming the Co-op wills service by combining legal expertise and digital skills

February 13, 2017February 13, 2017Co-op3 Comments

I’m James Antoniou, I head up the wills team at Co-op Legal Services. Over the last 10 months or so, me and my team of will writers have been working closely with James Boardwell’s team of digital specialists at Co-op Digital. Both teams wanted to make it simpler and faster to create a legally robust will for Co-op customers and by combining legal expertise and digital skills we’ve done just that.

Joanne Schofield wrote about how making a will can be daunting and how we’re trying to change that and more recently Becky Arrowsmith wrote about how we’ve improved the accessibility in our wills.

This is the first time I’ve worked alongside a digital team but I don’t think it’ll be the last. Here are my thoughts on it.

James: We looked at doing a fully online, end-to-end, digital service. I had a lot of reservations in that, and I think probably most lawyers would do, because they couldn’t see how a computer could be a substitute for 15 years’ worth of experience. So the way we built the service was as a hybrid between being able to take the benefits of the accessibility of starting online, but also making sure that everyone who went through the service took advice to make sure that what they were looking to do was, in fact, having the right legal impact of what they were actually looking to achieve.

So the digital way of working is something that was very new to me. I think as… as a solicitor you are… you’re working in an environment where you’re expected to know the answers, all the time. And coming into the digital environment, it was more about learning, and putting things to users and understanding what they’re telling us, rather than us telling them what they should know.

So, I think legal services and digital; I think it’s… it’s the future. I think it’s the way that legal services are going to be delivered mainstream, over the next sort of probably 5 to 10 years. I think at the moment there is limited routes to that online market. I think that plenty have tried and failed perhaps cos they’ve been offered a wholly digital service as opposed to a service where you get the benefits of the digital channel but it’s also backed up by some robust legal guidance and advice. And I think it’s that hybrid which is where the… the future of legal services lie; because it’s not just about accessibility, it’s about making sure that… that the right advice is being given. And secondly, and probably more importantly, that the customer feels that they are getting the service that’s of value to them and that they’re prepared to pay for it, and they feel that they’re protected, and that it’s something that is going to meet their needs.

Go to coop.co.uk/wills and find out more.

Making it easier to become a member

February 10, 2017Co-op22 Comments

Last week we announced we’ve reached the 500,000 new member mark since we launched our new Membership in September last year.

Earlier this year we also said that we want a million new members in 2017 and with that in mind, it’s really important that first-time users can register as easily as possible. That’s why, in our last sprint, the Membership website team focused on improving the user journey and reducing drop-outs.

Completing the online registration

To get an online member account you have to register on the Membership site. If you’re already a member then it’s a case of registering your card (or temporary card) you bought in store.

When we looked at data, only 34% of people who started to sign up as new members, ie those who hadn’t got any kind of membership card from coop.co.uk/membership were completing the journey.

Improving things for this user group is key to achieving our target of a million new members this year. Someone signing up here is potentially a new member that we might never see again if they leave the site at this point.

Something didn’t quite add up

Google Analytics told us that we were losing a significant number of people at the point where we asked new members to pay £1. At first we assumed that paying £1 was too much for some customers. But the 34% successful sign up rate didn’t match well with what we were hearing from users we’d talked to. We found that although some people questioned why we charge £1, their reactions didn’t indicate that a massive 2 out of every 3 of them would be put off by it.

From this, we hypothesised that the poor conversion rate might be down to people who were already members arriving at the £1 payment page. They would have already paid to join, so they could be the ones leaving at this point.

There are over a quarter of a million members with temporary cards who haven’t registered them yet. We know that after 28 days the chances of a card being registered falls dramatically so designing a user journey that helps temporary card holders succeed first time and become ‘active’ is vital.

How we improved the user journey

To solve this we added in another step into the process for anyone wanting to join as a new member. The important interaction change we made was to ask the customer if they had a Co-op card, rather than asking them to remember if they were already members.

We included images of the old ‘honeycomb’ card, the new blue card as well as an image of a temporary card as visual prompts. From there, if they have a card we take their membership number and direct them to sign in or register. Now, they don’t see a screen asking them for another £1. We only let people who say they don’t have a card progress further.

It’s working

Our latest data shows that 58% people who are routed to join follow this journey successfully: they pay £1 and become members. That’s a significant increase. Those we now redirect automatically to register are completing their journeys successfully too – which in its own way is important.

As an aside we’ve also reduced the risk of members duplicating their membership by joining online when they already have a membership number. This reduces the burden on our call centre, which currently is the only way members can link their accounts if they have more than one.

What we’ll be working on next

Our next improvement is looking at the sign in journey.

So if you haven’t done it yet it’s now even easier to join us!

Derek Harvie
Product manager

How user research is helping us improve the Membership site

December 7, 2016December 8, 20166 Comments

My name’s Simon and I’m one of the user researchers on the Co-op Membership team, alongside my colleague, Vicki Riley. It’s our job to understand what members and non-members need from the service and find out what they think of it. This way we can act on their feedback and continually improve things. Whilst we’re responsible for user research, the whole team get involved in research sessions and meeting users so they can empathise with the people who use the services we’re building. This ensures they design with the user, and not themselves, in mind.

We don’t just rely on one method of user research to find out how people feel about the Membership service. We gather feedback in lots of ways and I wanted to share these with you.

Feedback through the website

The website has a ‘give feedback’ link. As of today, 7 December 2016, we’ve had 9469 comments. We’ve analysed them all and have been comparing them with what we learn from our other research approaches.

Phone call follow up

We often do phone interviews with people who have said they’re happy to be contacted about the website feedback they’ve given. This allows us to get more detailed feedback and also find out how people expect things to work.

Online surveys

We sometimes do online surveys of which allow us to range a wide range of people quickly and easily. These surveys are around 4 or 5 questions long. We’ve found that the easier it is for someone to give us feedback, the more likely they are to leave some.

Speaking to people in labs

We also speak to people in our research labs. These sound far more ‘scientific’ than they actually are. Research labs are usually a room with a computer, a microphone and a camera allow the rest of the team to observe the research. We invite people in, talk to them about shopping, loyalty cards, online services and Co-op Membership. We then watch people using the service as they complete tasks such as registering a temporary card or choosing which local cause to support. I ask them to talk me through what they’re thinking as they use the service so that we understand how they’re finding it.

Store visits

We already visit stores but we plan to do more of this.

Tracking website traffic

Finally, we also gather analytics from the website. This allows us to understand which pages people are visiting, how long they’re spending on pages, what they’re clicking or selecting, and which error messages are triggered most frequently.

By using a combination of these research methods, we have access to a wide range of interesting data about how people use the service.

Using research findings to improve

So here’s an example of how we’ve used what we’ve learnt from our research to make a change.

We’d seen through lab testing that people didn’t always understand that they could choose their own cause to support with their 1% for your community reward. We found people thought that we decided for them, or that they would email us later on with their choice. They didn’t notice there was something on the screen that they could click to choose a cause. Here’s how the page used to look:

The comments from the feedback link told us the same thing. People had commented:

“I can’t find where to vote regarding where the 1% goes.”
“How do I select my preferred local cause please?”
“Should be able to select which charities I want to support.”

The analytics were backing this up too. We saw that a significant number of people were getting to the page with the ‘call to action’ (the bit where they could choose a cause) but they weren’t actually selecting one.

The team came up with an alternative design to try and make it more obvious how the user could interact with the page. It was a simple content fix. We added ‘See your local causes’ inside the box about ‘your community’. When we tested it with people in the lab, they understood it – they knew what to do. So earlier this week we put it live. Now the page looks like this:

It’s early days but we’ve already seen more people selecting their cause and therefore benefiting their community. We’ve seen a 10% increase already. We’ll be keeping an eye on the feedback to make sure we’ve improved the journey. We’ll continue to research regularly and as always we’ll keep using what we’ve learnt to improve the service.

Members can visit membership.coop.co.uk to choose a local cause. If you’d like to become a member you can sign up for membership.

Simon Hurst
User researcher on the Membership team