Business Overview
AT&T is a Fortune 10 company that provides high quality communications and networking services. Products and services include wireless mobility, cloud services, internet network solutions, IP voice, cybersecurity, and IOT.
Problem
AT&T Business is a large organization serving B2B customers. It comprises of multiple business units and systems; some of which are legacy applications for individual products and services. The problem was the user experience differed from each portal, applications, and sites. The user interface was inconsistent due to different platforms and hard coded legacy systems over the years. From a user’s perspective the complex tasks, unresponsive design, multiple flows including: login/registration, service management, ordering, reporting, billing, support portals, and navigation made it frustrating and time consuming to use.
Challenge
How might we design a unified experience?
Approach
We took a human centered design approach to the challenge.
Empathy
We started with empathy. We analyzed feedback from surveys and interviews from ethnographic research to understand the user's pain points and needs. We also performed an expert heuristic evaluation of existing flows to recommend best practices.
To better understand the user, we captured the user data with these methods: Personas, empathy maps, and journey maps to help us identify the problem areas and the opportunities for improvement.
The user needed a place to login, manage and view the status of their services, orders, reports, bills, and access to support. Our goal was to improve ease of use, time on task, and customer satisfaction.
Ideation
Our ideation methods include: brainstorming co-creation workshops/work sessions, information architecture, wireframes, competitive analysis, analogous inspiration, and journey mapping.
Prototype
With a high fidelity prototype we were able to make our proof of concept tangible to acquire feedback from stakeholders and users. It helped us validate our assumptions.
Validate
The new system is being released incrementally and improving with every release. The system also goes through rigorous accessibility and usability testing to ensure the application is accessible to all types of users.
Solution
The solution was to design and develop a unified experience. A user interface that is simple, easy to use, consistent, aesthetically pleasing and functions as expected. Accessibility to all types of users was also taken into account. The 2.0 Design System comprised of reusable components/patterns that are responsive and developed in a CMS framework that unifies all the platforms. The overall solution simplified the user experience, helped users find what they need and to quickly complete their daily tasks.