Iteratively redesigning
Eagle-eyed Co-op members would’ve noticed a redesign go live just before Christmas (see it live here. You have to be a Co-op member though. Hey, why not become one?) This was the culmination of 3 months work to determine a new design direction for Membership on the web and — by all means — it’s not going to stay this way. Let me tell you why.
‘Future Membership’
We started off collecting all the research that we have on members from the past year and actively engaging with business stakeholders to understand what a ‘future state’ of Co-op could look like — effectively a wishlist of ideas. We then prototyped a new Membership logged in design and iterated on it over a number weeks with a weekly lab test session with Members. The feedback from members helped to hone this vision into something that was realistic and useful to members.
As we iterated on this future vision, the beginnings of a new design language emerged. One that felt fresher, more compelling but, crucially, a better expression of the Co-op as a brand. The previous design, although functional, didn’t reinforce the perceptual feeling of the brand as well as we would’ve liked.
We worked closely with the group marketing departments to make sure that we weren’t drifting too far away from what it means to be Co-op.
By the end of the discovery, we had the fledgeling components for a new design language. A foundation to build upon.
‘0.1’
The discovery finished by the middle of November and we were given the mandate for more time to push this redesign through to the current live Member dashboard — effectively reskinning the content that is currently there.
This flies in the face of how we have been working as a function in the past 2 years. Usually, we start with user needs, then design the content/IA, then interaction design comes after these parts are determined.
So why did we redesign the dashboard this way? Well, we were confident the content was sound (our team had the original content designer in it) and a redesign wouldn’t stray too far from the point we were trying to get across to the Member. The point of the redesign was to make the dashboard _feel_ more Co-op and lay the groundwork for future iterations of the dashboard, which this new design could facilitate better than the old. There were peripheral pressures from other service areas that were also evolving the design language of the brand online and we needed to be moving at pace with them; also, Christmas was looming and we didn’t want to break momentum.
‘What’s next’
Unfortunately, the redesign went live with a few things missing from the cut because of time constraints leading up to Christmas. Membership is a huge engineering operation within the Co-op so our little team has been utilising the current period of downtime to understand how we can work with the engineering teams better and start introducing rapid design iterations to the dashboard. We’ve done this by tidying up the code we couldn’t do before Christmas and pushing as often as we can. Nothing gives an engineer the jitters more than they see a bunch of commits come in from a designer pushing to master!
The redesign will also form the basis for a unified design language across all the Co-op digital products and services, with a design system acting as a support.
The ‘future membership’ state was designed to signal an intent for what membership meant to Members in 2018 and beyond so we need to get as close to that vision as we can. We have the beginnings of the design in place, we have a new design team within Membership and we are drawing up a roadmap to work closely with partners and deliver content to Members that is relevant and timely. This new design forms the basis for this to iterate on and I look forward to sharing more of the iterations in the coming months.
