My 3 years at Optus

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Optus

Singtel Optus Pty Limited is an Australian telecommunications company headquartered in Macquarie Park, New South Wales, Australia. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel. Optus is the second-largest wireless carrier in Australia, with 10.5 million subscribers as of 2019. The product offerings of Optus range from Mobile Phones, 4G, 5G and prepaid mobile plans, and home internet.

My role and contributions

I was hired by Optus in July 2019 to work as part of the experience design chapter that was spread across the digital sales tribe.
During my 2.8 years tenure at Optus, I got an opportunity to lead experience design including UX and UI of some high net worth projects, impacting millions of customers across Australia

As the Lead Experience Designer,

My responsibilities included:

  • Collaborating with Product Owner and respective business partners to define product backlog
  • Lead UX experimentation across sales squads, guiding the team on well- defined hypothesis, prioritisation framework, and solutions to be tested.
  • Leading end-to-end UX research including testing plans, participant recruitment, facilitation, synthesise and presenting findings/insight
  • Designing new customer journeys and interfaces, from low-fidelity to high- fidelity artefacts including sketching, wireframing, interactive prototyping, and visual design
  • Auditing and optimising web interfaces to ensure the highest possible standard of experience design across optus.com.au

Some Major Projects I worked on:

Optus Choice plans

Optus mobile plans went through a major revamp in 2019 in the form of Optus Choice Plan. A new model of giving customer a flexibility of building their own plan was also introduced.

My Role:

Senior Experience designer

Opportunities and challenges

  • Opportunity to redefine online shopping experience
  • First in Australia Build-your-own plan launch

Process 

  • Stakeholder interviews and workshops
  • Journey mapping
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframes
  • Prototypes
  • Usability testing
  • Multiple Showcases

Business Impact

12% increase in online sales for new customers

25% increase in NPS

Optus Family Plan

Optus introduced a new bundles plan for families in 2020. The plan included 4 SIM plans clubbed together for $149 with an ability to add more child plans to it for $29 each.

My Role:

Lead Experience designer

Opportunities and challenges

  • Multiple complex scenarios
  • Extremely lengthy process
  • First of its kind online shop journey in Australian market

Process 

  • Stakeholder interviews and workshops
  • Journey mapping
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframes
  • Prototypes
  • Usability testing
  • Multiple Showcases

Business Impact

New product launch for 15% of total customer households.

Seemless transition to new family plan by 5.6% families across Australia

 

Subscription Plans

Optus transformed all its mobile plans to a post paid subscription model in 2021. The project came with its own complexity in migrating new and existing customers to the new payment model.

My Role:

Lead Experience designer

Opportunities and challenges

  • Shift in mental model of customers to adapt subscription model for mobile plans
  • Multiple complex scenarios with multiple payment terms for various Optus and third party add-ons

Process 

  • Stakeholder interviews and workshops
  • Journey mapping
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframes
  • Prototypes
  • Usability testing
  • Multiple Showcases

Business Impact

Generated $5m uplift in revenue by targeting 1.5% of new customers 

Optus Digital Core2.0

Core 2.0 started as a digital transformation project in Aug 2019 with a vision to transition from a legacy platform to Salesforce commerce cloud called SFCC. The flexibility of the platform presented me with an opportunity to refine and improve overall online purchase experience for Optus NBN customers.

 

My Role:

Lead Experience designer

Opportunities and challenges

For new customers: 

  • NBN new plan purchase journey
  • 4G new plan purchase journey
  • 5G new plan purchase journey 

Existing Customer 

  • NBN new plan purchase journey
  • Re-contract or Rate plan change journeys
  • Home relocation journeys
  • Complex relocation journeys 

Process 

  • Stakeholder interviews and workshops
  • Journey mapping
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframes
  • Prototypes
  • Usability testing
  • Multiple Showcases

Business Impact

40% reduction in cart abandonment

10% increase in NPS scores across sales funnels

Digital Design System

While working on the Optus Digital core, a need of proper design system was identified.With assistance of the Fjord design team, I worked on establishing the new design system following the Atomic design methodology

 

My Role:

Lead Experience designer from Optus.

Opportunities and challenges

Lack of design system was leading to:

  • Discrepancies between design mockups and implementations
  • Inconsistent designs across various projects and sections of the website.
  • Increased design effort due to revisiting the design language with every project
  • Increased development time due to confusing design patters and rebuild efforts.

Process 

  • The process was documented and played back in the following file in Jan 2022

Playback File

Business Impact

For designers:

  • Focus on concept design and journeys without worrying about component designs
  • Create building blocks and design like lego
  • Less documentation is needed for handover to developers.

For stakeholders:

  • Easier to align with marketing and brand language
  • Better time to market
  • Reduced cost of maintenance
  • Consistent customer experience

Behavioural Economics Academy

In collaboration with Fjord design team, I initiated a new project at Optus called Behavioural Economics Academy. The purpose of this academy was to educate the designa nd delivery teams to effectively use BE principles while designing new online shop journeys and running smaller experiments using Optimisely.

My Role:

One of the founding members of the Academy.

Established engagement system within Optus digital sales tribe.

Opportunities and challenges

  • Being a massive organisation, there are multiple initiatives being undertaken in parallel. Every team works with their own methodologies while refining designs and conducting experimentation.
  • There was a need to bring all the teams to one platform and define a consistent and effective way of design refinements using BE principles.
  • The project came with its own challenge of first educating the teams on various BE principles and Biases

Business Impact

  • Immediately after establishing the governance system, we started seeing people conducting various controlled experimentation with a defined rule set to measure the success based on BE principles.

Disclaimer: Due to the confidential nature of these projects, I can run through the details in person, However, I am unable to put up design artefacts online for reference.

Department of Education: Service Navigator

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June 2018 – July 2018

 

Summary

Sitback was engaged by the NSW Department of Education to redesign their internal service navigator tool which was also tested with end users to uncover key experience issues and determine ways to improve the user experience before launching the new tool.

For this UX design and research project, we conducted a documentation review, and ran a stakeholder workshop with key stakeholders to uncover business requirements and objectives for the service navigator tool. We then created user interface designs in the form of an IA and wireframes templates in 3 form factors (desktop, tablet and mobile). Further, we ran 12 usability testing sessions with representative end users to valiate the new designs and concepts to understand their needs and motivational drivers in relation to the seeking out school services applicable to them. Usability testing allowed us to assess the effectiveness of the information architecture and user interface designs for different user types and tasks. The information gathered was then presented back to the Department of Education with updates made to the wireframes, along with a report detailing the findings from the research activity.

 

Overview

The NSW Department of Education (DoE) is re-designing their service navigator tool to provide their users a better experience when looking for school services. Sitback was engaged by DoE to provide user experience services to conduct UX design and research to determine the most suitable design and how to best structure information in the tool’s information architecture (IA) to support school staff in finding the services they need more easily.

 

Challenges

The existing version of the tool was not well received, and school users had issues with the tool’s functionality and content displayed. Users also questions the purpose of the tool as they felt that it did not let them easily find the contact information of the services they were after. There was also some competition with the service finder’s functionality with other services provided by the Department such as EdConnect (Call center to find services/help within the Department).

 

Our Approach

We conducted an extensive documentation review to identify the business requirements and familiarize ourselves with previous research and assets for the service navigator, e.g. analytic results. We then conducted a stakeholder workshop to understand the business requirements, what they see as the main purpose of the service navigator tool and what they hoped to achieve in the re-design.

Based on the insights from the stakeholder workshop and documentation review, we developed 9 wireframe templates across three form factors (desktop, tablet, and mobile) with a total of 27 wireframes and interim information architecture to advise how the services can be ordered and structured in the service navigator. Lastly, we then conducted 12 usability testing sessions with various school users across New South Wales. Using the wireframes that we created, we created a ‘clickable’ prototype to test the effectiveness of the information architecture and wireframe designs. We tested with school principals, teachers, and school administrator staff to understand how they use the tool.

Through the testing sessions, we uncovered several major usability issues in relation to the information architecture, labeling, layout and functionality of the proposed website. Users were unable to find the key information they required at times and were not able to complete all the tasks that we asked of them in the usability testing sessions.

Results and Outcome

Based on the findings from the 12 usability testing sessions we produced a Usability Testing Analysis report to document our findings and recommendations. We also prioritized and highlighted the critical recommendations to assist the project team in identifying the key updates to be made to the wireframes. We completed the project on time and the information architecture and wireframes was well received by the stakeholders within the Department. As a result, the new designs have now been implemented to create  service navigator tool.

 

 

 

Sample Wireframes

Mobile                             

 

     Desktop 

 

 

Sample UT report