My Vodafone App
My role
Lead UX Designer
Overview
The brief for this project was to create a new app experience for Vodafone. Vodafone Group represents 22 markets globally, each of whom had a different app for their customers. The challenge was to create a single reference design for all the markets to adopt, to drive a consistent app experience for all Vodafone customers around the world.
UX research responsibilities
Competitor analysis
Guerrilla testing
User testing scripts
User testing results analysis
UX research team communication
UX design responsibilities
Ideation
Sketching
Wireframing (Axure)
Prototyping (Proto IO)
Workshop management
Detailed UX specifications
UI collaboration
Business requirements management
Stakeholder communication
UX team design alignment
The Users
When I joined the project, Vodafone Group had provided the team with personas to inform our design decisions. Expectedly, the scope of the user’s lifestyles and comfort with technology was diverse, which was reflective of Vodafone’s customer demographic globally. To cater for this level of diversity, the team and I carried out numerous rounds of user testing, both qualitatively in the lab and informally through guerrilla testing to validate our designs. We boasted some of the highest system usability scores in the industry during these rounds of testing.
Primary User Goals & Design Principles
The primary user goals in the My Vodafone app was to check plan usage and billing information. The design was driven by these two prerogatives, alongside key design principles such as designing to optimize the majority use cases and designing for the frequency of use in a practical real-world setting. A key business driver that pushed the design was that Vodafone wanted to make the app the primary touch point for the customer and as a result, a multitude of other functionality was incrementally introduced, which created constant design challenges; but by adhering to principles like those above, we were able to design an app that exceeded user and commercial expectations.
Design Workshops
The team held weekly workshops to discuss the areas of the design that we’d be working on in that sprint. These workshops proved to be an essential sounding board for ideas and were very effective at creating design consistency amongst the team.
Sketching & Conceptualisation
Sketching was an integral part of my design process. It was crucial in communicating design ideas to other members of the team and iterating my design ideas quickly.
Axure Wireframes
Throughout my 10 months on the project, I produced hundreds of wireframes that would eventually be documented in UX specifications as final deliverables to the development teams in the various markets around the world.
UX Specifications
During the project, the design team and I had very little communication with any development teams and therefore, a key component of our deliverables per sprint was UX specifications. However, when I first joined the project these specifications were being documented very inconsistently which was potentially problematic for the developers responsible for the build. As a result, I produced a ‘specification template’ that the team picked up and started to use.
Information Architecture
Early on in my time on the project I was given the task of managing the information architecture. As we worked in sprints and towards quarterly releases to the various markets around the world, I had to update the IA periodically based on newly completed work and track any iterations to existing work that affected it. I was also responsible for communicating any updates to the partner team working in Pune, India.
Prototyping
As mentioned, the team and I conducted numerous rounds of qualitative user testing in our UX lab in Paddington. I was responsible for creating high fidelity prototypes for these sessions. We would prepare scenarios and flows that we wanted to test and I would liaise with a visual designer to create the screens and UI elements required. I would then build these UI elements into a prototype in Proto.IO. These testing sessions proved invaluable in validating our designs and provided key KPI’s for stakeholder management.
Conclusion
I worked on the My Vodafone App for a total of 10 months, leading the UX design for approximately 6 months. The app has been a huge commercial success for Vodafone, hitting its target of 36% market penetration in its first release.
Project outcomes
25 million users
50 million expected by the end of 2017
Live in the UK, Greece, and Portugal
Rolling out to 17 markets worldwide
97% client satisfaction score
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