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case study

Telecom App Revamp    

Status: Revamp is being launched in phases by Ooredoo Oman

Links:

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/om/app/ooredoo-oman/id396885963?platform=iphone

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=om.ooredoo&hl=en&gl=US

About Ooredoo

A leading international telecommunications company, with operations spanning the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. The motto being “Enriching people’s digital lives”, Ooredoo works as a real digital enabler across markets with an aspiration to help people simplify their lives and enjoy exciting and rewarding digital experiences. In Oman, Ooredoo is the leading telecom service provider with close to 3 Million subscribers.

Business Challenge

There were several downstream systems that cater to each of their user segments. Maintaining and updating the many systems was costly and time-consuming. The general public also considered the experience and the aesthetics of the existing app clunky, outdated, and difficult to use.

 

  • The challenge was to provide customers with the best experiences (easy-to-use, transactional, and revamped) under a unified system.

  • Improve the app's ornamental value and elegance by strategically implementing elements such as fonts, colors, and images.

  • Improve visual hierarchy and ensure proper alignment and consistency of screen elements.

  • Improve app engagement with enticing offers and exclusive schemes.

  • Ensure that the brand experience, its value proposition, and the brand goals are aligned to the user experience.

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Kick off meeting and Stakeholder Interviews

The primary purpose was to bring everyone on the same page and unite over one common goal. We interviewed stakeholders to understand what and why we are trying to achieve for the business and on what timeframe. Set expectations right regarding look and feel, functionality, and target audience. Interviewed the following teams:

 

  • Customer support team to get more insight into the problem areas that customers complain the most about.

  • Technology team to understand constraints and limitations.

  • Business team to understand the key areas of improvement to support business needs.

  • Customer experience team to get insights into the CSAT scores, NPS scores, etc… to identify pain points and areas of improvement.

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Competitor analysis

The primary purpose was to identify essential features in the competitor’s app and map out their strengths and weaknesses. We identified areas that made our existing app less usable and perceptible than the competitor which provided a better user interface and features. Questions we asked and analyzed were:

  • What are the competitors doing differently?

  • What works?

  • What doesn’t work?

  • Are there innovative solutions that we can borrow that will better engage our users?

  • Are there things they’re doing that we want to avoid?

Analyzing User Reviews

The primary purpose was to analyze the displeasure among detractors and areas for improvements. Areas of concern include:

  • Usability

  • The intuitiveness of the interface

  • Confusing content and wording

  • Higher app size

  • Instability and

  • Availability

Analysing App Analytics Data

Analytics of the existing app helped us understand how users are currently using the product, and identify the biggest pain points they encounter based on how long they use the product and how many screens they visit. This also gave us hard data that helped us make specific recommendations for where to focus the efforts of our redesign. Areas of concern include: 

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  • Unusual Drop Offs from a purchase journey at 95%

  • High Page Load Time at 12 seconds

  • Low Task Success Rate at 5%

  • Low Daily Active Users at 150,000

  • High Churn Rate at 50,000

  • Low Average Session Length at 45 seconds

  • Low Monthly Active Users 250,000

  • Low Daily Stickiness (# of daily sessions/ # of DAU) at 1.2

  • Low Monthly Stickiness (# of DAU/# of MAU) at 0.6

  • Low Customer Lifetime Value (Total spend OMR/Total # of buyers per date)  at 300 OMR

User Interviews

The primary purpose was to understand the user, their needs, pain points, and behavior around the existing app and the competitor apps. We conducted 30+ interviews with users that ranged from daily activities to infrequent, 18 to 60 years old, students to working class to home makers and English and Arabic speakers. We prepared a screener, guidelines, scripts, a facility, remunerations, etc… Key Insights include:

  • Unable to locate key features in the app

  • Unable to view relevant or personalized offers

  • Notifications not being deep-linked to a final step of subscription, instead confusing the customers with multiple steps.

  • Having to enter debit or credit details every time for a payment was a pain

  • Long, confusing onboarding journey and more…

Findings

  • Across all age ranges, their top priority is to check data usage when using the app.

  • Everyone had issues with the purchase journey.

  • The younger generation is frustrated that they have to type in their credit card details every time in order to pay their bills, while the older generation prefers to pay their bills through desktop instead, citing security and visibility reasons.

  • All interviewees found the main screen too cluttered. Confusing and cluttered UI. No categorization.

Design Challenge

  • Figure a way to improve the navigation so that the most important tasks can be quickly identified.

  • Across all digital touchpoint tracks, we also had to that ensure that every team and their designers used the same design language.

  • Finally, we had to ensure simpler journeys in order to win the trust back from the users. There would be no point in having redesigned a mobile application if it didn’t cater to the most important needs of a user would there?

  • Ensure information is available and quickly.

User Personas

We consolidated the user needs and pain points with an affinity map and came up with user personas. We then decided to design for the three most frequent personas, as the other personas are more tech-savvy and will definitely be able to use the app.

Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map helped us to visualize how customers feel at all brand touchpoints so that we could avoid potential issues ahead of time, increase customer retention, and discover key information to make the best decisions for our business. It helped address questions like:

  • What are the customer touchpoints?

  • What’s customer engagement?

  • Is our app interface user-friendly and matching customer expectations?

  • Why is the user navigating away from the app so quickly?

  • How often is our customer reaching out to customer service and is the team able to address the issues in a timely manner?

  • How is the customer interacting with our brand before they decide to make a purchase? How are they feeling at this stage?

Information hierarchy

We wanted to make a something like a blueprint or a visual representation of the product’s infrastructure and hierarchy.

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Process

  • Take inputs from the User personas and User journey maps. 

  • Conducted card sorting within the team.

  • Conducted guerilla testing with some outsiders. 

  • Iterated to narrow down on the best hierarchy or presentation of information. 

  • Documented and circulated the sitemap. 

Wireframes and sketches

We started with hand sketches to offload some of the ideas. We used Crazy eights sketching as a part of diverging ideas. This was a great way to force ourselves out of one variant and explore other crazy ideas. Evaluation is was the iterative process here. We validated the wireframes in terms of user flow and experience and identify areas where improvements were needed.

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Process

  • Take inputs from the User personas and User journey maps. 

  • Conducted daily brainstorming within the team to define the journeys per module.

  • Sketched out the ideas (Diverge).

  • Regrouped midday to assess the ideas (Converge). ​

  • Documented and circulated for approval. 

Design

We brought the prototype to a colored high fidelity prototype adhering to the group’s branding guidelines. Improved Bill Payment design by introducing the saved card feature. Added clear rewards and gamification to boost engagement

Usability Testing

We tested our prototype with 5 users which are 17 to 65 years old. Some findings were:

  • Users still found our main page too cluttered.

  • Users were confused about the navigation bar in terms of a couple of items.  

  • Users liked the bigger fonts for certain sections

  • Users expected a payment confirmation page.

  • Users liked the 2 step purchase journey.

  • Users liked the My Plan page.

Results

The revamp is going out in phases based on Business priority and Tech Bandwidth. All of the Usability, Engagement, and Transactional KPIs went up within the 2nd month of launch for the revamped areas.

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  • Drop Offs from a purchase journey reduced from 95% to 85%

  • Page Load Time reduced from 12 seconds to 6 seconds

  • Task Success Rate increased from 5% to 20%

  • Daily Active Users went up from 150,000 to 350,000

  • Churn Rate reduced from 50,000 to 40,000

  • Average Session Length increased from 45 seconds to 2 minutes

  • Monthly Active Users increased from 250,000 to 420,000

  • Daily Stickiness (# of daily sessions/ # of DAU) increased from 1.2 to 3.6

  • Monthly Stickiness (# of DAU/# of MAU) increased from 0.6 to 0.83

  • Customer Lifetime Value (Total spend OMR/Total # of buyers per date) increased from 300 OMR to 350 OMR

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THANKS FOR READING!

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Hope the process will help you improve your next UX project.

Connect with me if you would like to share your thoughts.

Hey, we're all beginners at something, right?

It's the attitude that counts. 

Cheers! 

danny.mail.me@gmail.com

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