FOCUS: PRODUCT DESIGN
ROLE: CREATIVE DIRECTOR / TEAM LEAD
ACTIVITIES: STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT, RESEARCH, UI/UX DESIGN, PROTOTYPING, USER TESTING
Syniverse is the stage manager that allows your cellphone to work across networks.
If you are like most people, you probably never heard of Syniverse. However, you definitely have used their services. Syniverse handles the piping that allows networks to talk to each other. In other words, without Syniverse it would be impossible for you to text your grandma if she is using a completely different cellphone provider than you. Syniverse is a throwback to early telecom and their customer portals reflect their age, clunky, labyrinthian clumps of UI that inly those who have spent years using can make sense of. Out Job was to try and change all of that.
The Ask: Strategically improve the customer experience by focusing on the modernization of the client’s product portals as a critical touchpoint, while creating a design system that extends across Syniverse.
My team and I dove deep into how actual customers use the Syniverse portals to do their day to day work. We worked with the chief marketing officer to identify clients across key segments and we conducted in person shadowing sessions and well as ethnographic interviews to better understand their objective and ultimately what they needed most from the customer portals.
We identifed that the custer we spoke with aligned across a few distyncet archetypes regardless of segment. Some were analysts, makers, others were overseers. We mapped out their common behaviors and recurring pain points with the systems as well their overarching goals in their job.
We learned that the enterprise user was highly influenced by consumer facing products elevating the bar of B2B.
Using design research enabled the development of new solutions for Syniverse while continuing to engage customers and stakeholders throughout the project.
End to end product design
My team designed the key product screens and workflows that defined the core functionality of the customer portal. We also worked to define a visual style and design system that scaled across the multiple functions of the customer portals. To expedite development and to expedite design we built our design system by styling IBM’s Carbon Design system. We went the extra mile and designed styles for graphs, animated glyphs for adding visual differentiation to pages and a dark mode color palettes.
Partnering to think stratgically, using customer exprience to build business value
As we audited the customer portals and worked with customers to understand their workflows. We also had conversations with our key partners to better understand the product strategy that drove CX decisions. The strategy that the team previously employed created a disjoint experience for customers that paid for advanced analytics features paired with a products that came with reporting functionality out of the box. Customers would need to generate reports in one part of the system and conduct deep analysis in another part of the system.
We created a strategy and CX that unified reporting with advanced analytics as an upgrade in one place. This approach simplified the information architecture (IA) and also provided a powerful upsell mechanic built right into the reporting UI.
Impact
After delivering on the first engagement and getting the entire company excited about the refresh of the customer portals, our team won another engagement. The second time around they contracted us to help support engineering in their development of the portal system. We started to design detailed flows and edge cases while providing engineering with assets and documentation during their dev sprints. Then COVID hit and all development was put on hold.