TELUS

MOBILE APP ONBOARDING PROTOTYPE

Mobile App · User Research · User Testing · Onboarding · Prototyping

A Fast-tracked Onboarding Experience

The TELUS Guide is an onboarding experience in the My TELUS mobile app that fast-tracks users to high value activities and information relevant to their needs throughout their customer lifecycle. I was part of a initiative to help TELUS Corporation, a telecommunications service provider, create an experience that does the work so customers don’t have to.

To comply with my confidentiality agreement I have omitted and appropriated confidential information. These designs are a reinterpretation of the original.

My Role

As a UX designer at No Fixed Address Inc, I collaborated with our UX team, project manager and creative team, product owners and managers from TELUS, and UX designers and strategists from TELUS’ partner agency, Nascent, to design this experience.

I was mainly responsible for:

• Research & strategic documentation that translated into tasks and activities

• User flows and prototype logic flows

• Iterative UI design and prototyping

• Support throughout two rounds of user testing set-up

• Analysis of test results into tangible product recommendations

The entire process involved a strategic discovery phase followed by two rounds of workshopping, designing, prototyping, user testing, and test analysis. 

The Introduction

How Did We Get Here?

We needed to have a deeper understanding of the customers and their needs in order to offer value to customers through relevant, high-value activities.  Our strategic approach behind this experience was:

1. Focus on a single, yet robust user story related to a core service to bring this to life

2. Build a profile of the customer to understand the users’ prioritized functional needs.

3. Identify onboarding touchpoints and create a prioritized map of the user's needs at those moments

4. Design a flow and experience that proactively fast-track users to contextually relevant activities or actions at any given point throughout their entire TELUS journey.

5. Prototype and test the experience to gauge experience efficacy, user comprehension and uncover core usability issues

To bring this to life, we concentrated on a singular user story which would narrow our focus (at least at the beginning) and keep the scope of the project in check.  

In order to understand the users’ prioritized functional needs and offer relevant, high-value activities, we would need to build a profile of the customer. TELUS would need to know the customer's product or service, a trigger that enables TELUS to reach out, and their place within the customer lifecycle.

Strategic Exploration

I was initially engaged to hypothesize customer app onboarding opportunities or triggers based on research documents, support content, and stakeholder interviews. 

To begin documenting these opportunities, I created what we called the "Trigger Matrix" that listed possible touchpoints during a customer’s journey and matched these to prioritized actions that the user might take at that point in time. In the absence of data, we were hoping to test the usefulness and comprehension around these activities.

Onboarding, Simplified

To begin create a flow of the experience, we honed in on three activities a customer might want to complete once they’ve gone home after receiving a new mobile device from a TELUS retail store.

We needed to ensure we had sufficient logic built into the experience for a variety of scenarios. This logic would help ensure that the correct segment (mobility customers) could access the experience at the appropriate moment.  

Three flows were designed for this project:

1. The primary user flow

2. A flow that captured logic of user activity decisions and also technical decisions of whether users had completed any of the three activities prior to entering

3. Prototype logic flow that illustrated the internal mapping of the screens and navigational paths in the prototype

We liked the idea of providing the details of the user’s new phone plan right away for them to review. While this may lead to a support call if something was amiss, this would help clear up a lot of the confusion and snowballing that occurred later in the customer’s journey.

In our first designs, we provided the initial high-value activities up-front on a standalone page while also creating real estate on the dashboard page to access the activities, but we found that users were having a difficulty understanding where to go after they accomplished those initial tasks.

We simplified the experience by keeping the introductory activities and ongoing onboarding experience all on the same dashboard.

In the subsequent round, the onboarding experience was built directly into the dashboard with less upfront screen and the ability to have existing cards be more adaptable for new users, which has many benefits such as:

• Contextually and adaptive messaging for specific audiences (i.e. “Review Your Plan” rather than “View Bill” for existing customers).

• Provided contextual messaging and instruction for audiences without drastically rethinking the user flow.

• Reduced single-use screens; a contained and simplified experience (which saves development costs).

• A new design to mitigate the comprehension issues around navigation that impacted our first prototype.

The Design Phase

Our team had to be ruthlessly efficient with only two weeks to design and create a prototype. It was challenging as we could not stray from TELUS’ existing design patterns and there were technical limitations to what could be built.  

This meant we had to stay close to stakeholders to ensure we were on the same page. We set-up design workshops where all partners collectively brainstormed on key sections of the experience and aligned on a design direction.

Once everyone was comfortable with a direction, I worked closely with our creative team to bring this to life. Using our user flow as a to-do list, I sat with the design team to brief them on the direction and sketched ideas that were then mocked up digitally. In the interest of time, wireframes and mockups were designed in tandem using Sketch.

Prototyping and Testing

I was responsible for the creation of the prototype using Invision and worked with our designer to add animation to the interactions. With the exception of a net new screens and existing screens that had been augmented, most of the app experience looked and felt the same as the existing app to ensure continuity.

Facilitated, in-person usability lab tests were conducted with both a remote TELUS UX researcher and a third-party research company whereby screened participants were brought into a lab, one-on-one with a researcher, and given a set of tasks to perform with a prototype. We were hoping to understand key usability issues, comprehension around activities and onboarding, and impressions of the experience.

While we ran into testing complications, the learnings showed that there was merit in furthering the exploration and rollout of the TELUS Guide onboarding experience.

What did we learn?

The results from testing showed that users had positive sentiment towards the experience, comprehended the functionality, and found immediate value in the activities. Usability issues were unearthed around messaging, navigation and user feedback that were addressed in the next design iteration. 

Here were a few key learnings:

• We needed clearer communication through language that explained the purpose, effort required and benefits of the Guide at the beginning to build accurate user expectations.

• The labelling of navigational elements needed to be streamlined to increase usability of the Guide.

• It would benefit the user to reduce the hard shift from onboarding to full experience. If we provided more context when completing tasks and exiting the onboarding experience by returning to the setup activities screen, it would provide visual validation of task completion before moving into the full experience.

• If we want to truly understand which activities are most valuable to users at a given point in their journey, we need data to validate our qualitative research.

• Additional learnings were gained regarding existing features and pages in the My TELUS app that the TELUS Digital team could leverage to improve the overall app experience outside of onboarding.

TELUS Mobile App Strategy

Kimono Design Sytem