Shifts
Overview
Shifts was born from the ‘Leading the Way’ project, a team made up of colleagues from Food and Digital to discover how digital could help food store colleagues.
The early success of Shifts proved great. It reduced time taken for colleagues to complete tasks and do so using their own phone device, creating real convenience - this created immediate and strong organic uptake.
We had ~59,000 users returning on a daily basis of a maximum possible ~66,000.
The product was truly meeting the needs of its users while also saving the business money. It allowed for significant reduction of paper usage and helped increase productivity for stores, allowing for strong financial investment.
My role in the team
I was asked if I would join the Shifts team. I would be a Co-op designer embedded in a team that was largely made up of a consultancy called Equal Experts.
We had to progress at pace as budgets were assigned to specific features and functionality.
We worked dual-track and I would conduct research to give the required confidence to get us ahead while other functionality was in build, I would lead on the visual and interaction design.
In this team, my responsibilities included:
- Leading the interaction, visual design and later, user research
- Organising, conducting, synthesising and presenting user research to the team and stakeholders
- Creating prototypes to co-design with users, in this case Co-op food store colleagues
- Supporting the product manager with research and evidence to confirm or invalidate assumptions
- Organising and facilitating mapping sessions with people not accustomed to human centred design (payroll, HR, TARA Team)
- Pairing closely with engineers to implement styling and behaviour across the product
- Organising and facilitating co-design sessions with the team (engineers, delivery manager, business analyst, product manager)
- Ensuring we had regular design review sessions to challenge the feasibility of design proposals
Interaction design
Shifts had many technical constraints as the amount of api calls being made affected performance.
I ensured there was constant involvement from the engineers in the interaction design phases, which allowed us to do the hard work to provide value for our users and business.
Visual design
We inherited an alpha version and had to create visual consistency, flexible patterns and a 'personality' for Shifts.
I developed a colour palette and created a visual consistency across the product, while also ensuring the typography worked across all devices. We had many users that would alter their phone display to suit their vision. This was a constant consideration.
User research
I would arrange to visit stores in order to test designs and work with our colleagues, the users.
I believe I would have spoken to and worked with well over 50 colleagues during my time on Shifts. Playing back findings to the team.
I would create flat prototypes that could be interacted with to facilitate these sessions, allowing us to co-design with our users. Doing this ensured we created value for our users and uptake of new features occurred organically.
Service design
Shifts had to request data from a system called TARA via an API in order to present the data on the web browser pages.
Lots of different processes needed clarity so we could create technically feasible solutions for our users.
I arranged and facilitated many mapping sessions with subject matter experts to create a shared understanding while indirectly introducing some new HCD ways of working to people. It created some very fruitful relationships.
The team and delivery
I experienced many team changes while working on Shifts due to budgets. Shifts was also very challenging from an engineering perspective so I knew immediately that everyone had to be involved in the design and delivery process. Sharing skill sets, responsibilities and experience strengthened the team dynamic.
Involving engineers throughout all research and design phases, ensured we used time wisely, feasibility was discussed early ensuring we didn't spend time on functionality that would be simply too complicated to deliver.
