Why did members stop opening the app?
This five-week study investigated why active members of a regional grocery cooperative abandoned its dedicated mobile application. Through extensive fieldwork across three cities, we mapped real shopping routines against digital product expectations.
Grocery co-op members, 2025
IN NUMBERS
01 — Grocery co-op members, 2025
interviews
24
cities
3
hours of recordings
41
findings
6
THE BRIEF
02 — The question and how we worked on it
Brief and Research Approach
The cooperative faced puzzling analytics: member accounts were active and store footfall was robust, yet their loyalty mobile app was rarely opened inside store aisles. The leadership team required qualitative evidence to determine whether members found the interface confusing, irrelevant, or redundant. Our fieldwork spanned three cities and involved twenty-four in-depth interviews totaling forty-one hours of audio recordings. Tomás Ibarra coordinated fieldwork across varied store formats, while Nadia Haddad conducted unhurried interviews with long-standing co-op members. We observed customers planning weekly meals at home and accompanied them through physical aisles to document exactly where mobile interactions broke down.
VOICES
03 — In their words (participants anonymised)
Participant Testimony and Core Numbers
The project generated forty-one hours of recordings, six fundamental findings, twenty-four interviews, and covered three cities. In-aisle observations revealed practical physical barriers rather than ideological resistance to technology. Participants shared candid perspectives during shopping walkthroughs:
“I only open the app when standing in the aisle, but the connection drops right where the grains are stocked.”
Participant, Grocery co-op members, 2025
“The paper circular on the counter tells me what is fresh today; the digital screen shows items from yesterday.”
Participant, Grocery co-op members, 2025
“I joined for the neighbourhood producer updates, not for a barcode scanner that fails at checkout.”
Participant, Grocery co-op members, 2025
These verbatim observations illustrated that digital features actively obstructed members’ quick, sensory shopping habits.
AFTERWARDS
04 — What the client changed
What the Client Changed
Following our paper charting session in Studio B, the cooperative leadership adjusted their retail and software strategies based on the six identified findings. Instead of mandating app scans for promotional pricing, the cooperative restored prominent printed weekly circulars at store entrances. Engineering teams rebuilt the application architecture around an offline-first caching model, allowing members to access saved grocery lists and regional farmer notices without needing continuous network connectivity inside basement grocery aisles. Furthermore, barcode scanning prompts were removed from primary navigation screens, repositioning the digital tool as a quiet, optional reference rather than an intrusive checkout barrier.