Creating T-Mobile’s new Cell Phone Plan Shopping Experience
How Ben redesigned the plan shopping experience for shopper’s needs and nearly tripled conversion.
The end at the beginning:
Ben’s research-driven redesign of T-Mobile’s plan shopping experience increased orders by 174%, increased take rate of preferred plans by 5%, and increased customer order size by 5%.
CHALLENGE
How can we offer more plans and deliver a better experience for shoppers?
| Role | Design Lead |
| Industry | telecom |
| Timeline | 4 months |
| Activities | Benchmarking, Usage analytics, UX Strategy, UX Design, Concept testing, Usability testing |
| Live site | t-mobile.com/plans |
T-Mobile wanted to introduce additional plans to shoppers, but the existing architecture and experience had been designed around prepackaged, static presentation.
The business challenge: we need to be able to sell lots of different plans, equally as well as we sell the just three we sell today.
APPROACH
Start by learning: what do shoppers need?
Ben began by poring over existing internal and industry research, market and research data, and psychological research around decision-marking to ground the work: what do people need, how is T-Mobile performing against that, and what will need to change to deliver on the new business requirements?
He learned that customers struggled to differentiate the plans offered (a problem only compounded with more plans being offered), that they had no way of relating the features to their needs, and that shoppers contrast options against each other to made decisions—something they were unable to do with the existing experience. They proceeded with low confidence. Is this the right one for me?
He took a codesign approach with regular stakeholder involvement that allowed him to lead the team through the discovery process, to identify different styles of shoppers and their needs, and architectural approaches to meet them. No selling at the end, because everyone was always on the same page from the get-go.
The ideas being explored were novel for T-Mobile, so Ben launched early stage concept testing to get input and build trust and momentum. This allowed the team to quickly zero in on ideas and features that moved the needle.
SOLUTION
A shopping experience that embraces flexibility and modularity to meet the customer and business needs
Ben created a streamlined plan-shopping experience built around flexibility and prioritizing the right information for customers at the right time. The approach utilized a modular, card-based model with catalog driven content and smart feature presentation, designed mobile-first. Customers would have the ability to state what was important to them, and have the experience show them what plan was most relevant, highlighting the relevant features of each … not just a generic stats sheet.
There were speed-bumps along the way. In one case, a costly system limitation prevented the prioritization of an individual plan’s information based on either customer or business priority. Without this, there would be no way to focus on specific features, and so plans would have to show all features (dozens!) or none at all. Ben drew on existing research that proved the importance of differentiation and focus when browsing and deciding, and initiated research specifically to target this question. The research presented testers with a variety of plan presentations, sought preference, and followed up on choices.
The results were clear: shoppers needed a way to easily skim and differentiate plans—without it, they were likely to choose the cheapest plan (not what the business would like!) or even more likely to talk (not what anybody would like!).
Ben advocated, validated, and implemented T-Mobile’s first plan comparison feature—shown again through research to be an absolutely critical piece of the puzzle, and one that he had to fight for with research.
This project was the product of deep research, future-thinking design, rich collaboration, and smart decision making: Ben and his team were able to accomplish things that had been tried many times before, and had died on the vine.
IMPACT
Happier, more confident customers, and hugely increased business impact
Upon the launch of the new plan shopping experience, average daily orders from the page increased 174%, take rate of preferred plans increased 5%, and customer cart size increased 5%. That this is a monstrous win cannot be overstated, and slayed the fear that giving shoppers more tools and flexibility would result in lowered take-rate.
Customers raved about how much easier it was to find a plan that fit their needs, and were heavily using the new capabilities launched to support plan shopping.