Creating a modern online shop and gaining back trust of the customers.
Redesigning the whole O2 online store from the ground up and focusing on a mobile-only experience.
To create a shop experience that is not dependent on „old corporate-thinking“ and uses a new disruptive approach a standalone interdisciplinary team is necessary. My role in that team was to design an experience without legacy thinking.
Year
Role
Agency
2018
UI, UX, Interaction
SinnerSchrader
The Challenge
Putting the effort in a system trying to fix it seems to be a way to go for big companies. Rarely you can start from scratch – not this time, in the agency I’ve worked for we’ve gathered enough evidence that it’s worth a shot.
The telecommunication industry does have three mature problems. Trust, complexity and price dumping. The approach, in this case, is to be fully transparent to the customer and giving him options to build his tariff based on his needs and a progressive way of closing the contract.
Setting up the team
We teamed up with our client and created a start-up like scenario. Our multidisciplinary team had the complete decision power but was also completely responsible for the success of our bet. We were the ones that had to prove that our hypothesis of reducing information, getting away from unnecessary marketing, hidden prices and overloaded pages is the way to go. Less is more – even if no everyone believes it.
We capsuled ourselves away from the agency and company headquarters into a new small and cozy office to be to outside influence.
How can we guide the user through the tariff jungle?
Through user interviews and self-experience we found out that O2 has an overly complex tariff system. So we explored a way to reduce the cognitive effort. We split a lot of pages into 3–6 individual ones. Having more pages results in having less complex ones. The user journey might seem a lot longer, but through a better focus on individual actions, the overall time spent by the user on making decisions is way shorter.
This also gave us the possibility for easier journey optimization and flexible A/B testing, since we could reorder individual steps in the users‘ journey without changing the pages themselves.
Insights
Refactoring a checkout of a telecommunication shop without a single asterisk. Did you see that coming?
Being honest with a customer leads to success and user retention. This also may lead to recommendations not only for the product itself but also for the brand in general. In the end, a conversion uplift above the expected speaks for itself.
Classifying informations from the beginning and sticking to consistent UI elements helps the user to set up his contract.
The journey could become long, depending on the contract the user was configuring, but we stuck to the progressive approach and let the user do one single thing at a time.
No distraction, no confusion because of marketing speech and no additional texts, which the user does not read anyway, leads to the cleanest shop I ever built.
Product presentation
To bring variety in products, which look the same since the first iPhone, I created a system to present the products with a spin. I think to be aware of technical boundaries and challenging the standard helps to produce adaptive product presentations like now in the Telefónica O2 shop.
Insights
We tested the amount of information, which should be presented in one screen and adjusted the flow concurrently. Additionalyl we used adaptive step bars to give the user always an overview of his progress.
Proof
User testing is key to gather data and data is the basis to create a meaningful design. Meaningful design needs to be tested. Double diamond design thinking has to be used to develop the idea from scratch with an MVP and to be able to optimize the UX.
Learnings
With the right team, anything is possible, even if not everyone outside of it believes in it. Challenging everything from the ground up, taking big risks instead of optimizing old systems can be the right decision. Set ways of doing things are not necessarily the right ones and even if it seems to be set in stone it can be done differently.
Not only saying that less is more but doing it by removing everything to the baseline and slowly adding things back in, is the right way to go to unclutter a product.
