How collaboration across different design practices created a successful launch for the EE Game Store

Drawing from her experience rotating within design, user researcher Lisa Kennedy has long been a facilitator, bringing people across disciplines together to work on design solutions that feed into research objectives and project briefs.

Collaboration is central to advocating for and sustaining service design and user research activities during design processes, so Lisa has sought to continue ensuring genuine evidence-based research informs design decisions which benefit both user experiences and business objectives.

Here she explains how collaboration across disciplines led to the recent successful launch of the EE Game Store.

The EE Game Store launched in summer 2023, introducing customers to a world of gaming they could access via EE. This launch involved working within a fast-paced cross-discipline squad, with a short window for delivery.

Initially, I worked on this brief as a service designer and then transitioned into user research. This meant I was able to see the brief through from early shaping all the way through to delivery — a perspective service designers or user researchers working on projects aren’t always able to see.

As a service designer

Initially, I thought about how to frame this problem statement to stakeholders which spanned design, marketing, brand, agency, SEO and product owners.

I tapped into what I’d learned about service design, which focused on bringing people together and encouraging collaboration between silos. For the first workshop, I started by outlining the problems: what the launch was about and the problem we were aiming to solve. I also outlined the opportunities. This was the fun part where collaboration came into play and we identified obstacles and addressed different customer experiences within the relevant end-to-end journeys.

I walked participants through the proposed purchase pathways for three different customers in a rough journey map using screenshots and icons to bring these non-existent journeys to life. Underneath this swim lane, I captured risks, dependencies, design challenges, opportunities and actions in separate swim lanes. From this, I ran a second workshop focusing on the content strategy to ensure a shared understanding across the squad. The workshop dealt with team ownership of the creation and delivery of content and content updates aligned with proposed design interventions as part of the launch.

As a user researcher

I designed, planned and facilitated two rounds of research with my colleague Arthur Chan. We spoke to a mix of new and existing EE customers who ranged from gamers and non-gamers who offered insights including their perception of EE as a gaming destination, giving us several opportunities to improve the user experience. These included emphasizing call outs across customer segments so customers know which products are available to them.

After round one of testing, I provided a summary of the research findings and outlined the design interventions for the squad to prioritise for the second round of testing. Design improvements included clearly signposting products relevant to new and existing customers and emphasising the guest checkout option.

Impact post-research

Overall, this experience offered the opportunity to be involved in an exciting launch from start to finish. As a service designer, I focused on collaboration and asking the right questions (hopefully) as a starting point to capture details at different levels of zoom to benefit all stakeholders. As a user researcher, I listened closely to users and conveyed the importance of smoothing out unnecessary friction points, particularly during the checkout process.

This is only the beginning for gaming at EE — follow us for future announcements.