MidCounties Co-op

Refreshing customer loyalty
Midcounties Co-operative is one of the UK's largest independent consumer co-operatives, serving communities across the Midlands and South of England through retail, travel, childcare, and energy services. With over 660,000 members, they're focused on delivering value and building stronger communities

Challenge

Midcounties came to us looking to bring mobile app development back in-house and transition away from their outdated 2015 design to align with their refreshed brand identity. They needed specialist mobile UX expertise to redesign the member experience from the ground up—focusing on membership value, digital membership cards, and community engagement. The project required input from developers, brand marketing, and senior management throughout the process.

Impact

Over two 5-day UX Sprints (10 days total), we completely reimagined the Midcounties mobile app for both iOS and Android. We delivered a modern interface built on their updated brand guidelines, transforming a dated 2015 design into a 2024-ready experience. Daily show-and-tells kept the entire team—from developers to senior management—aligned throughout, eliminating surprises and ensuring everyone could provide feedback. The result gave Midcounties complete ownership and control of a clean, simple mobile experience that truly represents their co-operative values.

How we helped

  • User research
  • Market Research
  • Wireframing - Low-fidelity, high-fidelity
  • UX design
  • Design system
  • Prototyping
  • User testing

Web UI Design

App UI Design

Branding

Approach

Pre-flight
We had a four hour meeting the week before the sprint to meet the team, discuss the project brief, walkthrough the current registration and onboarding process, confirm the deliverables and obtain any necessary assets before the first day of the sprint.
Daily calls
Every morning we had a 15 minute stand up with the Midcounties team
Show & Tell
At the end of each day we sent an email with a link to a prototype plus a video screencast of us presenting our work to the Midcounties team
Prototyping
Prototypes not presentations - we prefer to show prototypes instead of screens. This allowed the  team to walk through user journeys instead of a set of static screens.
Handover
We performed three rounds of user testing which were all recorded. The video recordings, feedback and results all made available to the Midcounties team, and written up into a user testing report.

Project

Team
  • 2x Senior UX Designers
  • 1x Researcher
Date
Aug 2024

Outcomes & Deliverables

80+ screens
Registration, onboarding, global information architecture
Production-ready
Production-ready screens, assets and iconography
Prototype
Comprehensive prototype split into user journeys
User testing
Video and feedback presented in a report
Design System
Colour, iconography, typography, grids, components
Research
Write something
Video walkthrough
Sharable video of us presenting the final deliverables
10 day delivery
Start to finish in just ten days