NOW TV + Broadband proposition

Context

One of my first challenges at NOW TV was to drive the user experience design across the various service touchpoints that emerged as NOW TV added broadband to its TV only proposition for the first time. For a digital-only business, broadband also added physical touchpoints with increased complexities and points of failure. The initial research and design were kicked off by an external agency and I was tasked with transitioning the skills, the process and the design assets in-house at the end of the engagement with the agency. 

My role

UX Lead leading a team of 5 UX designers, 5 UI designers and 2 copy writers.

Challenge

• Improving collaboration between designers and ensuring consistency across all most service touchpoints
• Bringing design thinking into a chaotic and high-pressure delivery environment
• Recruiting additional designers

Process

After my initial assessment and observation of what was a chaotic high pressure delivery environment, I found that designers were working in silos (Sales, Account Management, Billing, Help and Assurance) without collaborating as well as they could with other designers. 

The five streams and their key customer goals:

There was no visibility of how the designs within each area worked in conjunction with each other. There were no regular reviews or design critiques.

Weekly sync meetings

The first thing I did was to set up weekly sync meetings between designers working across silos. This was an opportunity for everyone to share what they were working on that week, next week and any roadblocks they were facing. This helped bring clarity in the work that was going on across all the silos. We also used the session to showcase and critique designers’ work and give feedback.

Collaborative ideation workshops

When I started, the design process involved receiving requirements from product owners and creating visuals based on those requirements and then delivering the designs to the engineers. Whilst this looked efficient from a delivery point of view, the ideas and vision were getting lost on translation between PO, UX, UI and the engineers. 

To mitigate this, I introduced collaborative ideation into the beginning of the process.

We invited the entire team to these sessions (POs, designers, engineers etc) and looked at the problem together and try to come up with ideas together. The multiple iterations of refinement and cross-pollination that happens in these session meant that the quality of ideas got better and there was an increased shared sense of ownership over the ideas.

Customer journey mapping

After a lot of back and forth with Brand, we managed to secure a big (branded) wall for our end-to-end customer journey mapping  (who knew wall space could be a rare resource!). The customer journey map was made up of the different phases of the customer’s lifecycle from discovery all the way to cancellation. Each designer was asked to stick up their latest design assets (wireframes or UI) on to their phase of the customer lifecycle. This helped us visually identified any inconsistencies in the designs and how the journeys flowed between silos. 

Having a dedicated wall for the end-to-end journey meant that we were able to better tell the story of the journey from a customer's point of view to various stakeholders.

Design toolkit

I worked closely together with the UI Lead and the design team to put together a global design toolkit with patterns used across most of NOW TV service touchpoints. These included the colour palettes, form elements and widgets. The toolkit was built in Sketch and uploaded to Zeplin for sharing with the engineers who then create a HTML5/CSS based pattern library based on the toolkit.  

Unresolved challenges

Accessibility

We engaged an accessibility consultant from the Royal National Institute of Blind people (RNIB) to conduct an accessibility assessment of the various NOW TV touchpoints. We realised that we had opened a can of worms! During the brand refresh of early 2015, accessibility was not factored into the requirements. Hence, a lot of the brand colours failed the colour contrast test (minimum ratio of 4.5:1 between the foreground and background colours). Although the assessment found a lot of positives with the designs (e.g. consistent use of colours across platforms, use of icons to supplement colours etc), we were not able to change the brand colours to make them more accessible. However, the engagement led to an increased level of awareness of accessibility requirements across the organisation.

Top down decision making: Lack of discovery research

The requirements were pre-determined and fed from the top-down without any customer research. Due to lack of research resources, a lot of the designs were going into build untested. However, we managed to outsource some of the validation research to an external user research agency which meant that designers were able to get feedback on their designs. In hindsight, the team could have benefitted from being empowered to conduct their own lean / guerrilla research (which we did start doing on latter projects).

Outcome

The new proposition of NOW TV + Broadband (branded 'NOW TV Combo’) was launched in July 2016. The team pulled together a massive feat under extreme deadlines and messy processes and delivered consistent journeys and relatively seamless experiences for the customer across 5 teams - Sales, Product, Account Management, Help and Assurance. Visually, all parts of the experience worked together as one unit that belonged to one company. 

Post-launch optimisations

The launched system still had several gaps which were progressively filled as part of the optimisation process that followed. Some of the subsequent optimisation and redesign projects included:

• Redesigning the cancellation journey to make it mobile optimised, simpler and more personalised
• Enabling customers to request refund online without having to contact NOW TV
• Revamping the customer feedback survey to increase the survey completion rates