Designing the biggest transformation in history of O2 that completely redefined the way company works
Introduction
For the last four years we have been a strategic design vendor on the biggest internal project in history of O2 Czech republic, during which we designed user interface of ecosystem of applications for managing services of O2 customers, their billing and documents.
Provided services
CONTEXT
Too many duplicate and mutualy incompatible apps had to be maintained. User unfriendly systems make training new employees a month-long process. Each new product had to be implemented in many different systems. The company was loosing each month.
It was unacceptable it took a whole month to learn using our legacy systems
Lukáš Uhrin, business owner
We aimed to design all UI to be intuitive and self-explanatory, so that everyone could just start using it right away without any training.
Even the most complex scenarios can be dealt with on mobile device.
We were not designing individual elements and pages, but the whole experience from start to end based on a real life scenarios.
Our interface copy is as straightforward as it can be. We avoid “empty words”, language that is too formal or contains a lot of abbrevations.
The new Moje O2 app combines together a CRM app for O2 employees and a self-care app for O2 customers . O2 operators and salesmen see the same interface as customers plus something more they need for their job. Navigating customers on the phone or showing them in person what can be done online by themsleves may save operators’ time in the future.
What we learnt
Treat frontend as part of the design phase, not the delivery.
Stanislav Krofta, Designer
Designing and coding several hundreds of unique apps screens required a solid system of reusable components and design principles. Within a year we created universal frontend design system for buliding HTML and CSS of web applications.
Since it’s first internal release, other O2 developer teams adopted this system and are now using it for building new apps, which saves valuable time and resources.
A win-win situation for O2.
Benefits of using a design system
In total we designed
Instead of maintaining dozens of mutually incompatible apps O2 now has only one app providing the core features for managing and serving customers.
The intuitive focused design makes that painful month-long process of training new employees a history. New users can start using the systems almost right away.
Clever design of proceses and performance-focused development made serving customers faster. For example ordering an internet for your home now takes only 4 minutes instead of 10.
Implementing single product catalogue instead of maintaining products in each application makes the company more agile in responding to new product ideas or trends.
Thanks to reusable design system built during the project, frontend of a new app can now be delivered much faster than before.
Prototyping and frequent user testing even during the early phase of the design proces lets you detect flaws when there is still time to correct them.
Being physically close to each other helps to cultivate personal relationships, removes friction in communication and increases overall effectivity.
Frontend is closer to design than the development, therefore it should be considered as part of the design process.
Doing things simple to understand often means lot of excepetions in code. Exceptions mean more complexity and lead to complicated maintenance.
Jakmile systém spustíte, dostanete plno nevídaných zpětných vazeb, takže buďte připraveni na ně reagovat. Malý rychlý tým to může běžně zvládnout.
People often say opposite of what they actually do, so instead of asking them how they work, observe them in their natural environment.
