Vodafone

Project overview

Global mega brand with over 300 million customers, I worked within the team responsible for delivering the overarching brand guidelines and digital assets for 22 markets across the globe.

Role: Senior UX Designer

UX design tasks

Workshop facilitation
Ideation and sketching
Wireframing (Axure/Sketch/Figma)
Prototyping (Proto IO/Invision)
Detailed UX specifications
UI collaboration
Business requirements management
Stakeholder communication
Agile team alignment

UX research tasks

Guerrilla testing
Competitor analysis
User testing scripts
User testing results analysis
UX research team feedback

Vodafone sites world wide were beginning to stray from the mothership. Sites were looking dated, primary tasks were getting lost, websites were not responsive and ultimately the inconsistency meant very different user experiences for customers across markets.

The end goal was to provide one consolidated and refined style guide for all markets to adopt and ultimately create a best in class experience across all devices from mobile through to television.

Inception

I worked within a multifaceted team incorporationg UX designers, UX researchers, UI designers and motion graphics professionals to bring together research and design concepts under the banner of 'WS2' (Web Simplification 2.0).

Our users

Early on I was asked to develop the personas we could take into workshops and use to craft our initial assumptions based on some of the quantitive research that had already taken place. With such diversity and reach amongst markets our primary users covered a broad spectrum of needs and comfort with technology.

The brand

Understanding a brand is crucial to successfully marrying the end goals of the business to good user centered design principles. It certainly helps when the brand principles resonate with you and have been created with the end user as the key component of all design decisions.

Workshops

Given the breadth of the overall ambition for the project numerous workshops were held to identify key aspects of development which could provide the biggest impact and trickle into the smaller components of the digital experience.

Sketching / Wireframing /UI

One of the focal areas for Telco in general is about giving customers better control over their spending habits and usage. This in turn helps customers reduce 'bill shock' and increases customers ability to self manage their account.

The personal account view ('My Vodafone') was seen as a primary touch point for users where users could see their current data balances, understand their billing cycles or top up with data and add ons whils being made aware of any offers or upgrades that may be available to them.

A vital component of rapid iteration is the ability to convey concepts to teams and stakeholders in a timely fashion.

I will always insist on initial sketching to make sure team members are are on the same page then work into the details through wireframing.

This helps eliminate stakeholder blinkering when it comes to UI aspects which may not be of relevance to the decision making at that point in time. 'Why is it xxx colour?' Should never be a question in the early phases of design.

I consistently used low fidelity sketches to convey concepts in a time efficient manner, we held a weekly meeting with global teams to update them on the design thinking and highlight any sticking points. This made for sharp turnarounds of ideas and meant we didn't need to heavily invest in certain concepts before nailing down a clear rationale.

Wireframing

As a team we settled on an approach to refine and finalise concepts within Axure. We worked across 3 breakpoints, mobile, tablet and web and all designs needed to reflect a high level of attention to detail before being signed off. This was mainly due to the need to keep testing as accurate as possible and equally involve the development team in early stages of the design process to highlight any potential pitfalls with our approach

UI design

As wireframing was taking place I would be working closely with UI designers to adjust and engineer how the final wireframes would be presented to users. It was here where we could really dive into the detail of what we were ultimately hoping to achieve visually for the product across all breakpoints.

Prototyping and testing

An interesting aspect of this phase was the challenge of translating prototypes for our key testing markets then seeing how cultural nuances would dictate further decisions on the direction of the designs.

Assumptions needed to be made at the start but it usually came as a happy surprise that many of these were indeed correct across all markets.

This was definitely thanks to the close collaboration between the leading markets.

Testing feedback

Lab testing in Vodafones in-house testing facility meant that we could live stream tests to multiple markets and key stakeholders all at once.

This meant we had near instantaneous feedback on sessions and were able to iterate quite quickly before more formal communications with stakeholders.

Conclusion

As expansive as it was, the project was deemed an incredible success.

Global teams had felt a part of the decision making process and were supported in their adoption of the designs.

Vodafone Group had certainly led by example and provided a great base for future iterations or large scale deliveries. For me personally this was an opportunity to work across numerous facets of the business which in turn led to a wide variety of problem solving and creation, my team constantly pushed the boudaries and were happy to challenge convention on numerous fronts it was ultimately a pleasure to work with all of them.

The full scope of traditional and non traditional UX principles was adopted in this project, in summary;

a design ‘DNA’ was developed by the marketing and branding teams
this DNA needed be core to our online presence and shine through in the ethos of all aspects of the brand
the current site was deconstructed into components and prioritised

Each aspect was then dissected and rebuilt using a ‘backend agnostic’ approach making it easier for the team to not be limited by the technical constraints of each market, rather we got to push each component to be the best it could be.