How we delivered ‘Check service status’
How Might We? Genuinely help customers.
I’ve joined NOW TV in a truly exciting time. Broadband was about to be launched and the company was going through a huge restructure to adapt to the new reality. Well the big news is out and I can finally tell you how my team and I delivered Check service status.
Joining NOW TV
Nirish Shakya called to interview me for the job. We have a lot in common — we both teach and we are both devotee user advocates. I was about to board on a 2-week vacation so the interview process was really quick. I remember being on the beach while exchanging emails with the recruitment team hoping I could join NOW TV shortly after being back in London.
My time at BBC NEWS was coming to an end. I had met some great people and taken part in fantastic award winning projects — one of which the Body Clock — but it was time to move on.
I was hired to lead the User Experience for the Assurance team. What that meant I was about to find out.
Do you know how Broadband gets to your house?
No. I really have no idea.
Exchange? Green box? Sorry, can you speak a bit slower please?
Some things you take for granted: Broadband was like that for me → an engineer will come to my house and he’ll do his magic (period)
To deliver the project we had to start from the basis — how does it all happen and what problem are we trying to solve?
Team(s)
The Design and the Scrum team
One of the things I try to do while working with different teams is to experiment on the processes I advocate for. My design team at NOW TV allowed me to explore different ways of working, learn while doing so and improve (a lot!) as a professional and a tutor.
My scrum team (the A-team — A for Awesome — as our scrum master Liam labelled us) was highly collaborative and we have had some good laughs. We were a team of 10 including PO, Scrum master, Developer, UI designers, Copywriter and Researcher. Now if we think of our stakeholders as part of the same team, as we like to do, we were about 30 — challenging? Well, sometimes.
NOW TV has a fantastic agile environment — there are several scrum teams working together to deliver and improve the product. As UX, I took part of the daily stand-ups, sprint planning sessions, retrospectives and showcases with stakeholders.
The project
With the launch of Broadband and the urge of immediate solutions for daily user problems, the business wanted to reassure customers they have all the help they need available to them online.
Continuous research
NOW TV had worked with Seren, a digital company, right before I joined them— they had done some valuable research that helped us kick off the project.
After initial meetings to get to know everyone, we scheduled a Focus group session and launched an online survey with the help of our in-house researcher Shilpi.
We wanted to find out more about our customers’ habits when experiencing problems with Broadband. Do they get on the phone immediately? Would they rather try to fix the problem online?
We also wanted to know about their experiences and learn with them. This research helped us not only understand our customers’ preferences but also why they would do certain choices.
Some really great insights came out of the focus group session:
- Customers don’t expect to have an online tool to fix their problems so their first instinct is to pick up the phone and call the company.
- Customers lack confidence in self-service systems.
- Customers think it’s not their job to fix problems and find Broadband talk intimidating.
Collaborative sessions — design studio
We kicked off by revisiting the research done up to that point. We looked at the insights and our customers’ stories and broke down these stories into motivations, needs and limitations. We phrased the problems we were trying to solve as How Might We? questions. And these questions helped us come up with creative solutions.
For these sessions, we got our key stakeholders in one room to sketch solutions with us — “Andreia, you’re not asking us to sketch again are you? — Of course I am.”
Having stakeholder buy-in from day one was essential to deliver the project. Research and Design sessions help us not only share a greater understanding of what we were doing and why we were doing it but also be on the same page at all times.
Our focus for session #1 was to answer the question:
How Might We increase our customers’ confidence in being able to fix their Broadband problems themselves?
Possible answers were:
- With simple and clear language
- By tailoring content and being clear about the next best action
- Displaying information on complexity and time
- Giving customers feedback at all times
- Delivering an engaging interface
At the end of the sketching session (2 rounds of crazy 8s) we had one voted solution to test: a service dashboard with status updates and troubleshooting solutions.
Meetings, workshops, design sprints, design studios, showcases.
Collaboration is key to the success of a project. To encourage collaboration and be able to delegate is an instrumental skill — it takes a lot of giving up but you gain so much by doing so.
Plus, it feels good when stakeholders recognise your effort to involve them in key decisions :)
Andreia has been very instrumental in helping to deliver the NTV online Assurance capabilities. In doing this, she’s been very collaborative, using different tools and prototypes to propose ideas and engage the team/ stakeholders. Her contribution has been quite inspirational.
Geofrey Aiwerioba, Product Manager NOW TV, Sky
Wireframes — creating refined solutions to validate our assumptions
I’ve reviewed the user journeys and every possible scenario we could think of after all our sketching sessions — next step was to mock up wireframes and run some guerrilla testing sessions.
We ran the sessions in-house - in the canteen or in the office breakout area - we carried an interview guide and printouts (paper prototypes) — one of us would ask the questions, the other one would take notes.
As feedback was good, we were ready to put our wireframes in front of real customers.
Guerrilla sessions are great to inform design decisions at initial stages. Doing it often helped us validate our assumptions and get the designs to a point where we were confident enough to go to Lab.
MVPs — Prototyping and User testing
Essential to the success of the project (I’d say THE MOST important thing) was to get our solutions in front of real customers. During the course of the project we’ve ran 4 Guerrilla testing sessions in-house and 4 lab sessions with real customers.
I’ve used Sketch to wireframe the app and InVision to prototype it (both Sketch and InVision are great and they’ve both been working towards improving the design workflow). The InVision sync app allowed me to update and export wireframes to the prototype with a single click which meant I could be updating whatever whilst doing research in lab.
First lab session — the one where we truly validated our initial concept
In our first lab session we wanted to test the users’ acceptance for the tool we were showing them.
We came up with the scenario where they were at home and they were struggling to have broadband connection.
The session was overall really positive and that encouraged the whole team to carry on with the tested solution. As new requirements kept coming in we continued taking our assumptions to the lab.
Visual design
Having time to show our customers refined visual designs is great. Customers do like to see a close-to-finished product as that helps them engage with it.
Our app uses a traffic light system to indicate faults so using final designs helped us validate the assumption that users would immediately understand a fault by looking at an orange or red status. Plus, as accessibility is one of our top priorities, colours were always accompanied with icons — a cross would indicate a major fault, an exclamation would indicate a minor issue and a tick would mean everything is good.
So what’s Check service status?
Check service status is an app within NOW TV’s My account that informs NOW TV customers of TV, Broadband and Phone service outages in their area or potential home setup problems.
The app also provides customers the next best action to fix problems with their home setup via troubleshooting flows catered for them. The flows use simple and clear language as well as beautifully created images.
Customers can access the app via My account or the NOW TV Help homepage - as soon as they land on Check service status, we’ll run quick checks to find out about any service issues.
Learning from trials and data
The topic Broadband can be intimidating for some of our customers so we needed to ensure that the interface and troubleshooting solutions were easy to understand.
The rapid research sessions and the team’s shared understanding enabled us to iterate and simplify the Check service status app.
The current online version is stage one to what’s to come and we’re working towards delivering an even better customer experience.
We’ve released the project for customer trials two months before the big day and we’ve been learning a lot ever since. The app is out now and available to all NOW TV customers and with the tagging put in place we are hoping to learn more every day.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
If you’re a NOW TV Broadband customer I’d love to hear your feedback. Visit Check service status here.
Credits (in no specific order)
Christopher Perrin and Tiara Warlop (Product owners), Liam Escario (Scrum master), Vick Gohil, Victor Velho and Kristian Bakalof (UI designers), Alex Florisca, Pete Mouland, Thomas Hudspit-Thatan, Ravin Patel and Daniel Setas Pontes (Developers), Mark Jones (Copywriter), Shilpi Dahele (Researcher), Nirish Shakya (NOW TV Lead UX)
