Consultancy project. 2020-2021 @ Bredvid. Large, fullstack team
Following their acquisition of Get, Telia wanted a common B2B web administration portal for both mobile and network subscriptions. In a team of about 20 people, we worked to create a holistic user experience across a variety of services, tying together previously disconnected products.
Understanding context
The first step of any task in a system as large and complex as this is to do thorough research into what other systems one needs to integrate into, as well as what the status quo is and how it should be improved. One useful technique is visually mapping out the systems, in this case highlighting dependencies between services using a simple python framework. We also interviewed both internal and external stakeholders, organized needs into user jobs and prioritized features in order to best accommodate the more important jobs.
Low fidelity sketches
In order to communicate better both within the team and in stakeholder interviews, having a visual anchoring is extremely beneficial. We therefore quickly sketched out examples of what a given system structure could result whenever we wanted feedback, open discussion or simply when we needed to wrap our own heads around the specific consequences of our higher level suggestions. It is not uncommon to go from here and back to further exploration into how the underlying systems should behave.
Conceptualizing new systems
One issue with combining two systems coming from different companies tailored to managing different products, is that their logical structures are likely not to match. In our situation, we decided to reconsider the whole functioning of the portals in order to create a more natural and future proof hierarchy. That process involved deep discussions with developers and system architects, as well as product owners external to our team, because without a deep, shared understanding of the backend system it is impossible to create a good user interface. This illustration is an excerpt of a proposal for how meta-information would be communicated between the system and its users.
High Fidelity Sketches
Whenever concepts pass the low fidelity phase, higher fidelity sketches are needed to explore the intricacies of the UI in detail, as well as both perform further user testing and eventually agree on a layout for the interfaces implemented by the developers.