Project overview

Introduction

Spectrum was in the early phase of a huge redesign effort when I joined their team as a vendor on behalf of Haddad & Partners. This redesign covered the entirety of Spectrum's digital presence, while my area of focus was on the consumer purchasing flows in addition to internal pages for sales agents.

https://www.spectrum.com/

Project overview

Product Overview

Spectrum's parent company Charter Communications is the 4th largest telecom in the United States and online sales represent the majority of their business, offering a lot of different types of services to consumers such as cable, mobile service, internet, and home phone creates great opportunities to upsell other services, but also creates a lot of complexity in regards to design.

Spectrum offers such a wide variety of services, in different configurations, and at different price points per region that its easy to overwhelm users with its offerings, and that's exactly what the old design was doing. The old design simply listed every available offer and configuration and left the user to sort out the mess on their own, attributing to higher levels of dissatisfaction and sales abandonment.

Project overview

Key Challenges

1. Increase order completion by streamlining the purchasing flow

   What we inherited from the old design was a single long form page that almost seemed built to overwhelm customers. My goal was to simplify this process and help guide the user through the sale to make it a better experience for them and a higher converting site for Spectrum.
   
   

2. Reduce cognitive load

   One of the biggest challenges we faced was managing, from a design perspective, the sheer amount of content that was in the purchasing flow. Initially we had dozens of products that could all be configured by the user in different ways, upsells and various types of banners, data entry forms, and complex tables for TV channel packages all competing for space on the same page. On top of that, there were multiple teams that had varying levels of say-so for different pieces of content. They would all need to be negotiated with in order to get the content to a better place.

   
   

3. Balancing design for metrics and design for users

   We had metrics that needed to hit and hopefully exceed, so the pressure was strong for everybody involved in the project to push for higher metrics. That being said, drowning the user in upsells and sales tactics can often have an affect opposite of the intended goal. I had to work hard to keep the product on a fine line balancing those two aspects.

   
   

The Approach

Design Process

Being the primary sales portal for a large telecom company, this was a huge project with a massive team. Though the design team for the purchasing flow only consisted of myself, another senior designer, and our design lead, we worked with marketing teams, content teams, internal tools teams, and more.

The Approach

Competitive Analysis

I performed a competitive analysis of 7 major telecoms (including Spectrum's) purchasing flows, documenting every step in the process and any relevant interactions or details. This document provided our team and others with a way to benchmark our own work as well as a way to evaluate the pros and cons of certain features or design choices in the purchasing flow.

The Approach

Simplifying an 

overwhelming process

The competitive analysis showed us how far the design of the old purchasing flow was to our competitors. While most of the major telecom companies had equally overwhelming flows, there were a few standouts that really nailed simplifying the process, creating an experience that guided users through the sale while also reducing the clutter of features that weren't relevant to their particular order. One of my personal objectives was to fight for a level of simplicity that, at the very least, would rival our competitors. ——— The amount of information that was being displayed to the user on the old site was staggering. I conducted a heuristic analysis of the purchasing flow and marked potential opportunities for content reduction and simplification. Instead of having a page that showed every conceivable option to the user, I used the basic principles of progressive disclosure(tuck, hide, displace) to reduce cognitive load. I also performed a content audit to remove every piece of content that wasn't working towards our primary goals.

The Approach

Live Testing & Design 

for specific metrics

Once we got closer to launch a small percentage of customers got the new site design. This allowed us to evaluate the performance of the product in a live environment. We had many teams tracking the testing data and creating insights into what areas of the design needed improvement. We began problem solving for pages with high falloff, products that weren't selling as much as before, and specific metrics that had to either match or exceed the original design in order for us to launch.

The Approach

Surpassing the old site in every key metric

It took some time to problem solve each metric, but in the end we launched a new site that surpassed the old in every important way. The new design is easier for the customer, aligns better to Spectrum's business goals, and strikes a balance between simplicity and the necessary complexity of establishing service from a major telecom.

spectrum.com