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Project Overview
In a time before the rise and rise of smartphones, mobile portals lacked creativity. Despite the fact it gave Telstra customers access to a variety of content such as; news, sport, weather, music, social media, customer services and billing information, few customers really understood the depth or breadth of services open to them via the portal.
Innovation was needed, and the Butterfly project was initiated by the Telstra BigPond team to see the portal reborn, breaking free of the dull cocoon that had been holding it back, resulting in an astonishing 66% increase in audiences to mobile sites!
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Symplicit were responsible for the user experience research, ideation, interaction design and creative design for this project with Changing Worlds responsible for the development & build.
SYMPLICIT:
Directors:
Stephen Moule, Jodie Moule
Project Manager:
Mark Jones
Lead Experience Designer:
Naomi Heagney
Senior Experience Designers:
Steph Bannister, Chris Michelle-Wells
CHANGING WORLDS:
Marie Holmes
Regional Director, Asia Pacific
Amdocs Interactive
Project Brief
The brief was to redesign the BigPond Mobile Portal located at http://m.bigpond.com.
The redesign effort was to refresh the visual look and feel across the mobile portal and introduce an improved customer experience. More than just a pretty facelift, the most critical component of the research and re-design process was to engage customers and to ensure the customer’s voice was present throughout the design ideation and validation processes.
This was critical, as the mobile portal needed to answer two key business imperatives, which were:
1. Driving customers deeper into the media network by encouraging exploration and engagement, and;
2. Establishing a clear understanding of what was going to encourage customers to move deeper into the content, engage with it and hopefully buy more of it; both of which was only going to come from involving them in the research and redesign process every step of the way.
Other key business drivers were:
- Be flexible and scalable.
- Increase advertising and promotional opportunities.
- Prioritise BigPond/Telstra products and services, while also providing easy access to third party sites.
- Improve the user experience, encouraging information discovery and searching through priority categories.
- Expose more of the deeper level ‘pay for service’ content.
- Simplify the information structure and overall interaction design of the pages at the highest level, so more information was exposed.
To achieve success these business goals would need to be balanced with those of both new and existing Telstra customers.
Project Innovation / Need
Innovation on this project was not limited to the design itself. Key innovations were used to drive communications throughout and beyond the life of the project.
Design innovation
The final experience has been delivered across 300 devices, with the design degrading gracefully across a range of smaller and older device types.
Within a single screen the core concept of modules were used as a way to indicate relationships e.g. links that relate to a particular topic, details that relate to a single subscription. A range of components that can be included in a module were developed to support different types of modules e.g. lists, detailed displays, input forms, errors and so on.
These components provide an extensible framework for different size screens, a critical need when considering the broad range of device types that Telstra customers used in the market place.
Project communications
Communicating the design to both business and the project team was done through a combination of wireframes and prototypes rather than one or the other.
A click-thru prototype was also developed in order to provide a stronger sense of the actual customer experience that needed to be delivered. Senior stakeholders could quickly understand the nature of design and how efficient it would be without having to know the detail.
Post-project communications
The Visual Style Guides were redeveloped to be accessible to a broader range of readers. Providing more context and rationale for the visual design rules, the style guide is being used more broadly across projects.
User Experience
Symplicit led the research and design effort with significant customer engagement across the entire project. The iterative design process saw up to 36 users involved in up-front contextual research; and 4 rounds of iterative user-based testing and validation of designs, in order to refine the interaction design, visual design, content and messaging offered.
Of high importance to the design team was to expose as many content categories and actual content that could be read and reviewed, at the homepage level. Limiting the need to ‘click around’ drove the design approach.
Telstra customers can access the BigPond mobile portal via their mobile device’s browser or for iPhone users’, a BigPond app can be downloaded for free from the iTunes App Store.
When customers purchase or upgrade their mobile device on a Telstra mobile plan they are provided with details of how to access the BigPond mobile portal. For customers who come into Telstra stores, customer service representatives are also able to demonstrate the product to clients. In this sense, Telstra has great control over the overall experience, as there are so many avenues for contact and query – should any issues arise.
Once at the BigPond portal, the customer needs no additional support to achieve their goals. Users can browse or purchase content (individual items or an entire subscription) with minimal effort. They can manage their content subscriptions, monitor their data usage, purchase additional data packs or personalize their BigPond experience as they wish.
Project Marketing
One of Telstra’s advantages over other organisations is the access they have to customers at the time they purchase their mobile device and plans. This means that rather than directly promoting the BigPond mobile portal, it becomes a value-add.
The BigPond portal has a role in a much broader marketing strategy for Telstra products and services; by driving more customers to Telstra devices and mobile plans, usage of paid portal content has increased.
The BigPond portal is also offered as an easy way for customers to monitor and manage their mobile plan, by exposing and simplifying access to billing information, the customer is given greater transparency regarding their bill. In the future, as customers revisit their needs for mobile devices and plans transparency regarding billing and mobile plans is seen as a critical way to build trust and retain existing customers.
While the uptake of smartphones is well documented, there are a still many people who have not made the move. For these customers, demonstrating the broad range of content they can receive on these new devices and is crucial.
Telstra has extended their bundled offerings from devices and data plans to now include content subscriptions e.g. get a free AFL or Mobile FOXTEL subscription with your $79 mobile plan on a HTC device; a move that sees Telstra again leading the way in provision of a diverse and rich cross section of content to their customers.
Best Audience Migration to Mobile Technology
This category recognises migration of an audience from a traditional media to a mobile platform.
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