Navigation Expansion 2020

AT&T.com navigation is a system comprised of multiple components that serves as the anchor for the customer experience. The existing strategy focused solely on Global Navigation, and depended heavily on intermediary pages from the menus.

HIGHLIGHT

Led the understanding of what a good outcome is and how to design an experience that leads to that good outcome equating to business value.

THE PROBLEM TO SOLVE
The application dependencies and inconsistent Wayfinding experiences led to friction with our customers. This was tracked by NPS, UX Audits, Analytics and Voice of the Customer metrics. Once on a page customers experienced a lack of orientation, churn within and moving between interior pages. In some instances, the experiences led to dead ends. The site was lacking clear distinct paths for moving forward and backwards once within a sub-level of the site hierarchy.

Our team was tasked with expanding our knowledge and skillset to all systems of navigation, which included a new footer design, breadcrumbs, jump menu, tabs, filters, and cross-browsing links. This entailed a holistic navigation vision, systems, and architectural schema for link associations.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO READ (5 mins)

This project gave me an opportunity to elevate my skill set from Lead UX Designer to Product Designer. Through research and data, I was able to ideate solutions, show added business value by enhancing the experience and solving for customer friction points. Manage and bring in cross functional teams, collaborate, and bridge various team missions into one common goal. My success to execute contributed to my ability to have grit, resiliency, adaptability, intelligence, and empathy. What set me apart as a Lead Designer was my experience as a project manager, to be organized, meet deliverables, see the gaps, understand feasibility and how to make concessions.

Vision

Make it about the customer, create business value

The art of creating added business value starts with seeing your business through your customers' eyes. Once the friction points for the customer were identified, the team focused on a strategy that mapped to design principles & navigation best practices. The vision was to create a better, more consistent, cohesive system comprised of mechanisms that allowed people to navigate the site efficiently, reset and provide orientation. These principles, along with a plan in how to create a better experience were evangelized across creative, product, engineering, SEO, business and enterprise leadership.

Definition

Holistically, the team accomplished a great deal in creating a fluid and scalable system.

My contribution was not just in ideation, testing, data analysis, design definition and delivery but also bringing together teams to discuss barriers and technical solutions.

My passion for navigation and creating a truly cohesive system created a growth mindset among cross functional teams. Applying the ADKAR methodology, I was able to build desire with awareness which provided the knowledge on the why, what and how. Led the understanding of what a good outcome is and how to design an experience that leads to that good outcome equating to business value. This created momentum in aligning systems through standards, design systems, a component library. I worked closely with product teams to built and deploy the navigation components.

Through many obstacles, either society or within the organization I was able to be resilient, power thru with grit by collaborating with other partners/contributors and fostering trust— with empathy and kind candor. Relationships, knowledge, critical thinking and making connections was my secret sauce in reaching our goals in this huge effort.

Result, business value & accomplishments

I created more options for design and content teams to build their domain experiences with interlinking & deeplinking tools by providing components for the design system and component library.

Contributed to the success in SEO rankings and increased cross browsing engagement within interior pages; increasing path progression.

Successfully shed 575,722 calls Aug-Dec 2020 and saved AT&T 1.2M – 3.2M with a small change of adding order status within the account menu. I initiated this menu optimization based off “how might we do better by serving our customers better” attitude, noticed opportunities for improvements. I reached out to the business & product owners and through cooperation made it happen.

For the customer…

Globally, there were mixed results. Some tasks, work flows became more direct and intuitive yielding growth in engagement, pathing and decrease in abandonment rates. While others created some churn. Even though we saw a significant increase in engagement from the implementation of the horizontal global menu and a decrease in call shed, unfortunately there was a dip in task accomplishment and customer satisfaction scores when it came to paying a bill or changing a plan. This additional navigation system added a layer that ended up driving customer to pages that were not in full alignment with taking on the heavy lifting of way-finding.

Delivery Experience Impacts the Overall Strategy.

Implementation revealed strengths and weaknesses.

The evolution continues to this day as teams approach each iteration with testing, learning, and refining organizational standards based on product iterations.