Vodafone Mobile Data
Working for 10+ years as the product and UE lead on several products supporting the Vodafone Mobile Data market entry and growth strategy to become industry market leaders. To maintain this position required innovation in user experience and significant software re-design to provide an improved and differentiated user experience. Working with UX agency's Seren, Fjord, and Sapient to conduct a wide ranging study of the market landscape, competitive position, future technology, and fit for purpose of the product. This insight was used along with user research, test data, and business requirements to propose a forward looking strategy for the software that would enable the product to provide an effective UX alongside strategic product developments for Windows 8, Mac OSX, and mobile platforms. The design needed to accommodate advances in technology, operating systems, platforms, and changes in user behavior towards connectivity, and the increasing importance of multiple device access. The insight also confirmed the ongoing need to help users cope with the ever increasing growth in mobile data traffic, network connections and usage.
Insight?
It was clear looking at the competitive analysis that some of the most successful products and UX for data connectivity make the process as seamless and simple as possible, and that the trend is more towards a minimal user interaction, whilst making it easy to access key functions and services as and when necessary.
Principals?
This combined with the business strategy lead to 3 design principals:
1. Information should be clear and relevant to the users connection and key services
2. Connection to the best network should happen automatically and not require interaction with the user
3. Access to additional service information and notifications should be present and aligned across different platforms
This resulted in re-design of the user flow, interactions and UI screens presented as annotated wireframes:
Use of competitive benchmarking to understand relative position of Vodafones Mobile Data proposition
Review of the wider eco system; Internet of Things along with market trends and future predictions helps to focus on potential opportunities for new product/feature/service solutions/experiences
Organising content, flow, and headings of the design using affinity mapping/diagrams, followed by capturing the user interaction with annotated wireframes
Selected wireframes were developed into visually comlete images, which were then used to create clickable prototypes.
The project was completed with UX documentation to capture the strategy/objectives, describe the flow, IA, and interactions, and style guide sufficient to enable developers to write code.
Mac OSX
Multi OS including support for Mac OSX requires alignment of the design whilst accomodating style and functional changes inherrent in the native OS. This involved reviewing the business requirements, user flows, interaction styles, and screen layout making use of the features available in OSX 10.8 such as full screen mode, creating an adaptive client which displays content according to the regular or full screen view. The re-design included changes to functionality so a complete re-work of the IA, and wireframes were produced in conjunction with UX agency Fjord along with mock up visual screens. All the work was produced using Axure and Photoshop. To assist the developers in understanding the interactions and user flows a click dummy prototype was created in Axure.
Windows 8
With the introduction of Windows 8 by Microsoft Vodafone was uniquely positioned as a strategic partner to develop a Modern UI Application to coincide with the launch. This required a re-imagine of the Mobile Broadband function and re-design from the ground up, looking at the business and user requirements, OS & API capabilities, and the new Modern UI design approach, style, and interactions based on a full screen (no chrome) touch first interface. This required creating a new set of user scenarios, storyboards, and use cases to describe the business requirements around the key areas of account management, notifications, extras, and help & support. A new interaction style was designed to present the information in accordance with the evolving Modern UI style guide.
