Finders Keepers
Making it easier for T-Mobile’s customer care & retail experts to find information.
I was the lead UX and UI designer for 3 different finder experiences that facilitated the search for phone plans, promotions, and devices. I assisted with the UX research, helped define the design requirements, and worked to ensure the correct implementation with developers.
Project Tid Bits
Duration
9 months (Fall 2023 - Summer 2024)
Tools
Figma, Figjam, Slack, Microsoft Teams, In-person collaboration & whiteboard sessions
Role
Lead UX/UI Design
Team
UX Design Teammates, UX Researchers, Technical Product Managers, Business Stakeholders, Software Developers
Introducing T-Mobile Experts 🤓
T-Mobile runs on their frontline employees.
They answer any question customers may have about T-Mobile; that’s why we call them experts. I don’t know about you, but, if I were an expert, I would hope that the internal tools were built to help me do my job and make my day less stressful.
Unfortunately, that was not the case when I first started this project. The tools experts used to discover and learn more about promotions, phone plans, and devices were a pain point.
More on T-Mobile Employees 💅
Our UX research identified 3 main groups of employees - retail experts, customer care experts, and corporate employees. I created these artifacts to summarize the T-Mobile employee archetypes.
What’s wrong with the current tools? 🧰
T-Mobile’s existing tools displayed inconsistent experiences making it hard for experts to find the respective information. This lack of cohesion causes wasted time, content fatigue, poor navigation, and expert burnout.
DESIGN QUESTION
How might we create experiences that assist experts in finding devices, promotions, and phone plans while interacting with a customer?
Simply put, how can we make it easier for experts to find information?
Enter… The Finders 🔎
We introduced three consistent, responsive finding experiences that enable quick discovery of relavent information. Let me break them down:
Promotion Finder
There are a ton of deals at T-Mobile and experts have always had a hard time finding the best one for the customer.
After research, we learned about the importance of filters and scan-ability.
I created a dynamic filtering system consistent across the finding experiences. I also increased the visibility of the most important attributes, so experts could easily compare promos. Additionally, I included an expand feature to the promo card so experts could check for additional information - even a deal’s compatibility with a phone plan!
Plan Finder
Plan Finder was a totally new product, so I defined the first internal flow for finding a plan at T-Mobile!
Creating cohesion across the finder products, I designed Plan Finder with the same UI patterns as the Promotion Finder.
With the help of UX research, I found that the discoverability of clicking into a plan details page was poor. So, I added a carat to the title UI indicating interactivity. Otherwise, our usability tests indicated that the experts easily searched for and navigated through phone plans.
Device Finder
The Device Finder was interesting because it integrates with many other experiences within the T-Mobile intranet.
We have a Device Comparison Tool that was previously disconnected from the existing device-finding experience. In the redesign, I enabled experts to select devices they wanted to compare directly in the finder which directly leads to the Device Comparison Tool.
Another huge integration was with the Promo Finder! I added a banner to the device card that guides the user right to the Promo Finder, which is pre-filtered with relevant deals. Integrations like these help experts find the information with ease!
What about implementation? 👩💻
I worked closely with Technical Product Managers, Product Owners, and Software Engineers to make my vision come to life. As the lead UX designer on all 3 of these products, I created handoff files, which included accessibility and development notes. I fielded questions regarding the frontend work and gave feedback to refine CSS, so the final product could be pixel perfect.
Wrapping up! ⛅️
I learned a lot from these three projects. Along with my collaboration with user researchers, I communicated with business partners so that I could properly understand and manage their expectations. Aligning with everyone across the product cycle was necessary to design “finding” experiences that satisfied technical and business constraints. Pairing those requirements with my user research enabled me to create user-centered experiences that were a small part of a much larger program initiative.
During this design process, I also learned much about design systems and creating responsive designs in Figma. With the iPad/tablet experience being so important to retail experts, I ensured my designs were flexible and responsive to different screen sizes. I am grateful to my design peers for sharing invaluable feedback and being amazing partners throughout this project.