Redesigned the desktop and mobile experience for Sugar Mobile
With a shifting landscape and changing legislation Sugar Mobile decided to push the cellular mobile experience even further with an eye on innovation.
The founders had an experience in mind gleaned from months of working the customer service desks and a few years out in the market already.
To bring this vision alive Sugar Mobile asked me to work with them to design the new experience. From the marketing website, copy, and both the mobile and desktop apps.
Getting up to speed
It would’ve been easy to simply dive into the user stories that the founders created and start designing right away but I opted to slow things down, resist the temptation, and really understand the why behind this shift.
I wanted to gain a clear understanding of the goals, needs, and plans of the business.
I dug into the product roadmap, made sure to understand upcoming business goals and milestones, and the business’ current understanding of their users and market—delving into risks, challenges, and opportunities.
Service Blueprinting
Getting cell phone service up and running involves a ton of moving pieces and requires tight coordination between a number of departments.
To make sure that the new Sugar experience takes this into account and not losing sight of their user needs and expectations I decided to run a
Service Blueprint workshop with the founders.
Service Blueprinting is usually reserved for current state experiences but in some cases it can be useful for future state experiences.
The goal was to gain a holistic view of the experience capturing not just the customer view of the experience but the “behind-the-scenes” work that goes into delivering the experience. In doing this we were able to uncover failures, pain points, and opportunities.
A service blueprint of the future state that we envision for Sugar Mobile customers
Validating our hypothesis
One of the things that I uncovered in the stakeholder interviews was that there wasn’t any formal user research data. With the blistering pace of development it was difficult for the small founding team to document their conversations with their users.
I knew it wouldn’t be sustainable to depend on the founder’s ear, and so I set out to interview 5 users to understand user behaviour, motivations, and expectations and validate the overarching hypothesis of Sugar Mobile:
Users want wifi-first plans that offer them flexibility and control over costs
I distilled the findings into jobs, gains, and pains.
A service blueprint of the future state that we envision for Sugar Mobile customers
Onboarding
Our primary challenge was to break down an often lengthy, confusing, and burdensome onboarding experience that led to a high number of users abandoning the process and not getting their service.
This meant asking for information that was timely and relevant, allowing users to anticipate next steps, and breaking down the process into small bite-sized steps.
All we need for now
The current sign up process involved asking customers for their name, email, physical address, and credit card information. I wanted to reduce this barrier of entry and only ask for what’s relevant for the task in hand.
This meant only requiring the user to fill out their name and email and to create a password. Everything else we’ll ask for when we need to. This also meant that if they abandoned the setup process, we could follow up.
To get started users all users needed was to create an account
What to bring
A frustrating pain point for users during onboarding was that they would start an important flow only to find out half-way through that they’re missing an important pice of information.
This led to users abandoning the flow and calls to Sugar customer service requesting help for what should be a simple self-serve function.
Before users register their Sugar Mobile SIM card, they're told exactly what they need
Brevity is beautiful
With clear, friendly, and conversational copy users are always in control. They know what to expect and clear on what they need to do next.
Before users register their Sugar Mobile SIM card, they're told exactly what they need
