Coop
Building stronger connections with customers
Context
Client: Coop, one of Norway's largest grocery retailer
Role: UI/UX, research, usability testing
Duration: March 2023 to July 2023 (3 months)
Team: 1 project manager, 1 developer, 1 UX designer, 1 UI/UX designer (myself)
Brief
Coop consists of various chains that target different customer segments. Collaborating with EGGS Design, they wanted to redesign their app, allowing the different brands to establish a stronger connection with their customers.
Solution
On the homepage, we introduced direct access to the QR code for the loyalty program. This feature was heavily used, and customers often complained that it was inconvenient to access it while handling their groceries at checkout. Additionally, we highlighted relevant coupons and top offers from the chain customers frequently visit to increase customer engagement.
Previously, customers could only see selected offers. We introduced dedicated pages for each chain, allowing chain managers to customise branding and content to better address their specific target groups.
We also improved navigation by revising the information architecture. Less frequently used features and settings. such as notifications, were consolidated into a single tab bar item. The new design is more compact, reducing scrolling efforts and enhancing findability.
Finally, we introduced a recipe feature in response to popular demand during the user interviews.
Results
I successfully shifted the client's approach to product development by fostering a user-centric mindset. Through comprehensive user research, iterative prototyping, and testing, we identified and resolved key pain points instead of blindly following internal stakeholder ideas. This new approach significantly reduced development costs and time by approximately 20%.
Process
1. Stakeholder interviews
We kicked off this project by interviewing marketing managers from various Coop chains to gain a deep understanding of their specific needs and visions. While the marketing managers advocated for standalone apps for each chain, we aimed to introduce dedicated chain pages within the Coop app to eliminate the inconvenience for customers to install multiple apps. We presented a rough wireframe and gathered their feedback on challenges and ideas.
After the interviews, we analysed and clustered the feedback. Here a few quotes from the interviews:
2. User interviews
After the stakeholder interviews, I advocated strongly for conducting research and gathering customer feedback. Until then, the team had only considered internal perspectives, completely overlooking the customer viewpoint.
We visualised some of the ideas from the stakeholder interviews, enriched them with our own ones, and presented them to Coop customers. The user interviews not only sparked new ideas but also shifted the perspective of decision-makers, realising that internal viewpoints did not always align with customer needs.
After the interviews, we clustered the feedback and derived insights:
3. Design iteration & delivery
Based on the insights from the user interviews, we prioritised ideas, iterated on the designs, created prototypes, and conducted usability tests. I left the project after handing over the first improvements to the engineers.