New EE Broadband experience launch

UX, UI, Prototyping, Figma, Rapid Iterations

Role

Senior Product Designer

Timeline

2023

Responsibilities

Lead experience design launch
User flows mapping
Prototype
Research and experience testing
Deliver new product experience
Accessibility

Background

The launch of the new EE rebrand saw the business go from selling mobile phones and data, to a vast range of consumer electronics and services. New EE was born to enable the BT group achieve their ambition of being the most personal and customer-focused technology brand in the UK.

With those ambitions came a new visual identity to help the brand grow and develop. A new and improved visual identity that took the strengths of the brand consumers know and love to supercharges it.

There was a need to create a new digital experience and journey that would convey all the new brand features and products. My squad was in charge of looking after the end to end new EE Broadband experience.

My squad was tasked to align and maintain the full experience that different squads within the digital team were designing. I needed to make sure the whole experience was coherent and had the latest relevant content for launch.

The scope of work was vast, and included:

Broadband Hub page
Broadband Learn pages
New customer experience (Get Broadband)
Existing customer experience (Renew Broadband)
App experience

Problem statement

Short term. To map and align all new EE broadband user journeys, making sure all content and elements were ready for their respective launch dates.
Long term. To maintain the end to end experience for EE broadband. To keep all different broadband squads in communication, ensuring optimisations and updates are shared between the teams, ensuring the whole experiences is always coherent for the user.

Goals

Map and align user flows
I created user flows of all journeys my squad was in charge of. Making sure all pages and elements that were under our scope were mapped. This helped the rest of the team, and the other squads to better visualise the extent of the experience and where the common spaces were.

Identify Inconsistencies
By having a squad oversee the end to end broadband experience, we wanted to identify all the common elements and make sure any inconsistency was removed.
Improve User Experience (UX)
The goal was to assist the users with their needs, to point them to the right direction depending on what they were looking for. New customers to the sales funnel, existing customers to log in, etc.
Launch a new broadband product experience and service
The final goal was to launch a new set of broadband products together with a new brand. Driving traffic to the right journey and improving the sales experience.
Personalisation
To learn about EE users. To become the most personal tech brand in the UK, we were tasked with providing enough value to users so that they would provide their personal data.

Challenges

Balancing numerous commercial needs.
The new rebrand meant introducing many new products and product categories. To accommodate the business needs of all of them, while keeping the user needs was imperative. A big challenge was to accommodate all different stakeholders asks.
Aligning different design squads.
To receive a handover of work from various teams with different levels of readiness. Reaching an understanding of the scope of work done and to be done. Also aligning with the stakeholders involved in the different experiences.

Las minute deliver of final creative guidelines and assets.
Pre-agreed timelines for the creative guidelines and assets had set their delivery for days before the pages needed to go live. This meant that final sign off had to be delayed to a last minute, to accommodate new messaging guide and artwork.

The work

1. Broadband Hub page

The Broadband Hub page is the main door to the EE broadband experience. The page had to cater and guide users. Its goal is presenting relevant content rapidly and stimulating the user to discover and engage further.

Entry place for a personalised experience. By learning and adapting to the user’s need, the hub surfaces timely prompts to allow users to make the most of their connected life with EE:

New customer
 A more generic hub, pointing the users to the sales funnel or learn pages.
Existing EE customer with only a mobile product
A personalised hub, pointing the user to special broadband deals and offers catered just for them. Also pointing to learn pages to learn about the products available to them.
Existing EE customer with a broadband product
A personalised hub, an entry point to manage their account and learn about products and deals that might be available to them.

Before launch, we tested the experience to understand if users were understanding how to navigate the page and complete their tasks. With the outcomes we implemented some small optimisations with the message and hierarchy of information to address some pain points.

On launch, together with the Pilot 2 Launch of the “Get Broadband” experience, we monitored the usage and visits of the page to prepare for future implementations.

2. Broadband Learn pages

9 different product pages, balancing numerous commercial messages. The pages were designed to educate users about the new brand and help them understand the new products and EE proposition, to make an informed decision before purchase.

All pages pointing to a sales funnel, servicing the business goals of driving traffic to sales. Directing the large volumes of paid advertising towards our new and existing product categories was a key objective.

The main layout designed with card components. Flexible, easily customisable and reusable.

The challenge was that each product page had a different stakeholder. The pages depended heavily on new creative assets and guidelines, which were handed to us a week before launch, making it harder for a final sign off aligning all stakeholders. We pulled through pushing for the user needs to be considered over some commercial messages that could distract from them from their final goal.

The pages launched by the end of August 2023, together with the Pilot 2 Launch of the “Get Broadband” experience.

3. New customer experience (Get Broadband)

The broadband sales experience for new customers to EE. Launching to the public in 3 pilot stages to test and optimise the new experience without impacting the overall site.

Pilot 1. An initial stage where the new broadband products were sold only via advisors (call centres).

Pilot 2. Launched in August 2023. A soft launch only appearing to a 10% of traffic entering to the sales funnel. Increasing progressively to 100% after a few weeks of adaptation. Only a part of the user journey was being released with the new designs. In addition, the products shown to users were only 80% of the full portfolio available on Pilot 3 launch.

The new features on this experience was a progressive reveal of products, as some add-ons were dependant on the broadband speed chosen/available to choose.

The launch discovered some technical issues on the checkout experience. Those were quickly tackled by the team and fixed. It also gave us the chance to optimise some messages to better explain the new proposition.

Pilot 3. Final full launch of new EE. Showcasing all product portfolio and with a full end to end new experience for users visiting the site.

I conducted usability testing with my team before I left the company, with discoveries on how to simplify and improve the experience.

4. Existing customer experience (Renew Broadband)

The broadband sales experience for existing customers to EE. An experience to regrade or upgrade their existing contract. Adding or removing products as their needs change.

The full experience was meant to launch on the last pilot stage, to align with the new customer experience full product catalogue release.

New EE project was about personalisation, and the existing customer experience was the main journey for it. The products and elements showcased on the experience had to be relevant for the user (existing customer).

As the experience was being launched further down the line, my team and I took on testing the experience with existing EE customers that were about to regrade their products. We wanted to validate the design of the new experience, understanding hierarchy of information.

The research and testing was successful in terms of the usability and understanding of the experience. Not so much with the portfolio proposition. Some users were overwhelmed with the amount of products offered to them, and questioned the reliability of the broadband service as “too many add-ons” were shown to boost their broadband.

With the launch date being further down the line we took our findings to the stakeholders and main design team of the experience. The design team had more validation to challenge the stakeholders at the Propositions team on how to present the new products to the users.

5. App experience

With personalisation embedded in the overall experience, the App was meant to mimic the web experience, but on Flutter framework.

The experience initially created for existing EE customers, to increase conversion of products. Mainly focused to trade to EE mobile users that could consider converting to EE broadband.

I left BT Group before getting involved in the final launch rollout of the new product portfolio on the App.

Final overview

New EE was launched on the 20th of October 2023. I left the company 1 week before the actual launch and could not see the end results of it. It is safe to say it was a big success and its premise on broadband with “Home, Work, Game and Learn” was helping users understand how to purchase broadband products depending on their needs.

The overall goals from the project were met and all the work I carefully handed over, was well received by the team and my colleague Ed Milner, that was replacing me.

On the project and work within the team, it was exciting to be able to manage and have full visibility of the end to end journey. It was ensuring a better and seamless experience for our users. It also was great to collaborate and lead the conversation with different design squads and align the work and goals.

Although, it was hard to go too much into detail when trying to optimise the designs, as that was the task of the specialised experiences squads. After launch, the scope of the squad was to identify potential optimisation work and act on it if it could be done without backend work. If a bigger work was needed, the optimisation would move to the specialised squad for the specific experience.

Contributors

Eva Vañó Seguí – Senior Product Designer
Alex Fletcher – Content Designer
Phoebe Clifford – Product Owner
Liv Rafferty – Junior Product Owner
Fabian Whyte – Content Editor