Solving Complex Problems for the 4th largest telecom.

I spent three years building, directing and curating the UX and Design team for the Sprint.com and Boostmobile.com. The following describes the first 6 months.

Senior UX Design Manager - Amin Swessi
Visual Design Team - 6 Members
UX Design and Research - 6 Members
Copy Team - 2 Members
Analytics Team - 2 Members

SPRINT.COM. DAY ZERO

The Challenge

I had 3 major initiatives: hire and build the design Innovation team named THE HIVE; update the tools and technology; simplify and unify the design system for Sprint.com and Boostmobile.com.

Hire an amazing group of UX designers, researchers and copywriters. Migrate from Sketch to Figma, established a dedicated DAM to archive historic content
Develop new processes to intertwine human centered and date driven design throughout all digital product initiatives.
Curate a 3-year roadmap with a complete design system overhaul to align with Adobe AEM requirements and merger with T-Mobile.

Benchmark Study

I conducted a quick competitive UX benchmark study between Sprint and T-Mobile, to see how users experienced navigational and core tasks, as well as how they rated their overall experience on these websites.

We ran an unmoderated remote benchmark study with 60 in-the-wild users on their own devices over the course of a single day, and collected both quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Participants were equally divided so that 30 went to each site, and completed several tasks in order to test and measure the design of the homepage, the website’s structure, and gather usability metrics for each site.

We also measured users feelings about the brand before and after their experience with the site, as well as their likelihood to recommend the site to friends, family and colleagues.

RESULTS

Sprint was seen as being Informational (56%) but also Overwhelming (61%). The category they fared the least well in was being seen as Lively (31%).

T-Mobile was the site that participants felt was the most Lively (69%) as well as Welcoming (68%) and Easy (68%). They fared the least well in was the Informational (44%) category.

Can users find what they’re looking for?

To test how effectively each site’s content was labelled, and whether or not visitors can find what they’re looking for based on how content is organized on each website, we told our participants, “You don’t want to manually pay your bill every month and would prefer it was done automatically. Where would you look?”

The ability to enroll in an autopay feature is what they were looking for. Here’s how they did.

“Enroll in AutoPay” got all of the correct clicks (76%). “Account & Billing,” on the other hand, got exactly 0 clicks.

T-Mobile’s taxonomy is obviously much more simplified, so how’d they do? The majority of users (73%) correctly clicked on
“My T-Mobile.”

Website Usability

Let’s face it - you can have the newest, sexiest, most technologically advanced smartphone available but it’s worthless without the right plan. Telecom providers understand this, which is why they work hard on providing plan options that will work best for their customers. Unfortunately, understanding the differences and costs of these plans can be challenging.

Sprint users were 25% more likely to successfully find the price than users on the T-Mobile site.

On average, successful participants on Sprint’s site were about two and a quarter minutes faster than successful participants on the T-mobile site.

T-Mobile’s participants went to 31 pages on average versus Sprint’s 49 pages. Participants on both sites had similar average clicks, with 7 on Sprint and 9 on T-Mobile. What these stats show is that users are spending a lot of time looking through the both sites trying to find the right answer.

EASE OF USE

After the navigation based task we asked all the participants to rate how easy or difficult it was to accomplish, with 1 = Very Difficult, 4 = Neutral and 7 = Very Easy.

Sprint’s users ended up rating the task as a 3.7 out of 7 on the ease of use scale. T-Mobile’s users ended up giving the task a 3 out of 7 on the ease of use scale.

Neither site got a particularly high score from their users.

PROBLEMS AND FRUSTRATION

We asked the users which, if any, of the following problems or frustrations they encountered while on the site.

28% of participants on the Sprint site said they didn’t run into any problems or frustrations.

The largest complaint participants had was a tie between “navigation was confusing” and “too many clicks to find the information” with 41% each. There was another tie in the next most common problems that “information was unclear” and “unsure where to begin the task” with 34%.

This one was very close – 27% of participants on the T-Mobile site said they didn’t run into any problems or frustrations.

The largest complaint participants had was that “navigation was confusing” with 57%, followed by “too many clicks to find information” with 53%.

CARD SORTING

Example MIRO Board: The Baseball SWOT is example of team building, roadmap planning and feature requests.

The game was played by all members of the of the digital innovation team from product managers, engineers and analytic researchers. It was first created using real post-it notes and then translated to a digital whiteboard so individuals could rank and rate each card. This ultimately guided our roadmap for the next 6 months.

Actions Taking

CARD SORTING / USER INTERVIEWS
RESEARCH AND DATA
DATA DEFINE OPPORTUNITY
PERSONAS AND JOURNEY MAPS

As the facilitator it was important to build a collaborative and encouraging environment aligning our understandings, goals and objectives as the new team formed and tribal knowledge was lost due to internal reorganizations.

Benchmarking and sharing our data validated our process and empowered team members to engage in the UX process earlier in the product lifecycle. Searching through Qualtrics and Adobe Analytics individuals could drive initiatives to support our teams.

Iterative Design Process | Planning

Designing a product that allows for A/B testing was critical to making micro improvements and conversion KPIs. A systematic process was created for initiatives to be throttled into production after reaching a level of confidence. Monthly team meeting open to receiving these initiatives grew in attendance month of month.

Resulting in a Online Submission Tool open to any team member.

Vetted UX Process

Understanding User Needs
Targeted Design Solutions
Empathy and User-Centric Design
Alignment Across Teams
Mitigate bias with Data Driven Decisions

Design Team Goals

Center of excellence

Lead Initial Kickoff and Internal Discovery Session
Branding guidelines, flows and personas.
Generate Low Fidelity Wires
Onboarding
Test High Fidelity
Brand Look and Feel Review
Go Live Prep - Test
Throttle Live

Generate Personas and User Flows

Telco personas represent the diverse user base of telecommunications services, encapsulating demographic details, technological proficiency, usage patterns, needs, preferences, and brand loyalty.

Tailoring their offerings to meet user needs effectively and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.