Company: Publicis Sapient | Client: Freedom Mobile | Role: Experience Design
Background
The ask was a complete ecommerce site redesign and replatform for Freedom Mobile, a Canadian telecom, that took place in 2019. Our client asked to reimagine the way customers interact with Freedom as a brand and as a cell carrier. After many workshops, explorations, pivots and iterations later we had a product that our team was proud of.
We aimed to address the challenge facing the complex nature of merchandising Telco products and services. Taking something highly technical and contextualizing it for a local market, this became our focus.
Process
Our initial kickoff and discovery phase was started during a week-long Design Thinking workshop led by our team. Without a defining strategy phase for this project, this workshopping set the stage for our guiding principal which was to “Simplify the way Canadians experience wireless”.
Collaborating as a highly cross-disciplinary creative team and using milestone workshops setup with our client, we established business motivations and balanced them with customer needs. We worked in 2-week sprints and completed the authenticated member experience, the customer facing shop experience, cart/checkout and help/support. Additional workshops and concepts were generated for a native app experience led by our team as well.
We were able to distill the eComm experience for mobile customers to it's core parts and we built a flexible but rules-driven design system using a strong governance model and universal language (parodying Atomic Design). The Lego block component system became easier and easier to leverage by the creative team and allowed us to come up with entirely new pieces of the experience quicker, while on the customer side they are able to learn a pattern once and know how to use it throughout - Connecting design to user.
Closing thoughts
Our development team was onboarded later in the process as the discovery and design was completed ahead of development kick-off. A tighter end-product could have been achieved if development was working in tandem with the creative track, but through all of this we learned the value of close collaboration, not just with product teams and creative but with all the moving parts. Clear communication and leveraging a more inclusive Agile methodology from the beginning would have been great to see with this project.
