The business need

As a wireline business, we were going through a transformation phase focusing heavily on the customer digital experience.

During this time, we brainstormed on questions like, "How might we encourage self-installation for broadband services?" and "How might we decrease call-in-rate?".

The problem

With these business goals in mind, we focused on Verizon's existing self-installation flow. At least half of customers called in asking for additional support.

At the time, I was tasked with taking a visually archaic experience and updating it based on our latest brand update.

The existing design had too many usability issues

At first glance, a heuristic evaluation would tell us that this experience had many challenges. This was supported by the analysis that our research team conducted. The majority of users didn't know what to do and spent a lot of time scanning the page.

This was a really big problem. Updating the design may have made our users more tolerant of these usability issues, but it wouldn't have fixed the underlying issue that the experience was complicated.

Evaluating best-in-class Wi-Fi products.

Eero and Google Wi-Fi screens

I focused my competitive research on experiences that made it easy for users to install their services. A lot of focus went into testing smart home products that let users set up mesh Wi-Fi networks.

Two key themes were identified:

The setup process focused on one task at a time.
The experience made it easy to recover from errors.

This research further supported our initial pain points.

Refining the scope of the project

Rather than make the design look more up to date, I refined the scope and focused on three categories:

As a user, make it easy to setup and recover from errors.
As a business, reduce call-in-rate and increase engagement.
As a designer, help the user by simplifying the process.

Rearchitect the installation process

While fixing the front-end of the design would help our users, I chose to optimize the overall experience from a back-end perspective. This meant working closely with the engineering team to see if we could use existing APIs to make troubleshooting easier for the customer.

Here is one redesign of the user flow.

User testing the initial experience

After multiple rounds of sketching, I put together a lo-fidelity prototype and tested this with usertesting.com.

✨Finding #1

Installation instructions were clear

Most participants felt confident that they would be able to install their equipment based on the instructions in the prototype.

✨Finding #2

Setting expectations is helpful!

The time estimates were received positively by participants.

✨Finding #3

Lack of recognition over recall

The what's in the box feature was helpful, but several participants still expected more detail.

As a result, labels were added in the next iteration of the design.

Feedback from our live usability session

We recruited 5 existing Verizon customers ranging from the ages of 21-38. The goal of the study was to understand if users could successfully install their equipment based on the instructions presented in the prototype.

✨Finding #1

Certain concepts were unfamiliar

There was confusion regarding the names "Video Media Server" and "Media Client".

In the next iteration, we re-labeled these to "Set-top boxes".

✨Finding #2

The app flow was inconsistent with the paper instructions

In the app, set up instructions for both the Video Media Server and Media Client were combined as one step, but are separate in the paper instructions that come in the box.

We split these tasks into two to make sure there was consistency across both sets of instructions.

✨Finding #3

Users didn't know where to place their network extender

At least two participants placed the network extender next to the router.

To avoid confusion and to make sure the users get the most out of their network extenders, we added additional information about where to place their network extender.

What we shipped

After addressing the main usability issues we identified through testing, we launched the following responsive web app experience.

The desktop experience

The mobile experience

What's next?

As next steps, we plan to make the experience even more streamlined by focusing on the Optical Network Terminal (ONT). An ONT helps users stay connected to the internet. With over 79 models, this is a pain point for customer service reps to help customers troubleshoot their equipment.

Creating a painless Internet and TV setup experience