Changing the way EE sell mobiles
EE – Acquisition & upgrade
Overview
When a customer’s mobile contract ends, they’ve already paid off their phone but keep paying the same amount unless they switch or downgrade. This lack of transparency put the business at risk of FCA fines, prompting a fairer, more flexible renewal journey.
Team
Working with the Product Owner and stakeholders, I ran three rounds of user testing to create an acquisition journey that was fair, transparent, and optimised for conversion.
User pain point
When I buy a phone from EE, I pay a monthly fee over a 2 year contract for the phone and line rental.
Unless I upgrade after 2 years I will continue to make payments for a phone that I have already paid for.
Business need
The FCA stated the way the big Telco’s sell mobile phones, is neither fair nor transparent to the consumer.
The challenge they’ve set is to make it fairer and more transparent or face probable fines & sanctions.
Customise your device – V1 for testing
We wanted to test if users could understand 2 separate steps across 2 pages.
Step 1 – customising a phone and Step 2 – selecting a plan. Do they understand this?
Choose your plan – V1 for testing
The majority of participants expected the total monthly payment to be the plan cost. Users failed to see the ‘Phone + Plan’ price total and breakdown displayed in the sticky basket.
Key takeaways
Users were confused with the accumulative pricing across the 2 steps, leaving them with a feeling that the total price for phone & plan was far too expensive.
Key lessons
You can’t always get things right first time, it’s good to 'FAIL FAST, LEARN & ITERATE'.
Customise your device – V3 for testing
In test 3 we brought in the redesign, our hypothesis was:
Would there be confusion in having steps 1 & 2 stacked on top of one another with a plan preselected?
Key takeaways
When users were asked what their monthly payments would be, all answered correctly. Having both steps on the same page added more clarity of the total monthly cost to the users.
Key lessons
When you can rebrand with the insight and lessons learned from up to date testing, it's far less risky.
Choose your plan – V3 for testing
All participants managed to customise a device and chose a plan. All were able to correctly describe what was happening on the page.
Complete your details – V3 for testing
Here we combined the following steps:
Personal Details, Billing Address, Delivery, Affordability, Change In Circumstance and Security Check.
Key takeaways
We checked here whether the new progressive disclosure form style was problematic. The only problem found on this page was the ‘Change In Circumstance’ question which is ambiguous at best.
That day we learnt that the business had agreed we could remove this question. This was a major win for increasing conversions of the mobile acquisition journey.
Key lessons
If there are obstacles in the way of delivering an improved product that are out of your control, share them along with accompanying data with the Business and just maybe in time and with perseverance they may listen and action a change.
Payment journey
EE – Acquisition & upgrade
Payment – V3 for testing
Combining Direct Debit, Payment and T&Cs into 1 step. We again checked here whether the new progressive disclosure form caused any problems.
Key takeaways
By combining key steps of the journey you reduce a users time spent navigating the interface, that time can be spent on page completing mandatory tasks crucial for continuation of journey. Less friction, pondering and fewer back end calls and a reduction in waiting time/loading for the users.
Key lessons
Less steps from a noise and cognitive point of view is always preferable.
