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Lead UX designer: Maurizio Lavalle
Junior UX designer: Julia Orlova
Product Owner: Sonia Khella
Introduction
VOXI is a mobile network that was introduced in 2017 as part of Vodafone’s attempt to capture the ‘youthful’ market in the UK. When the company launched – and even until today – VOXI was perceived as a new brand and very few people made the connection to Vodafone.
To give visitors to the website reassurance of the legitimacy of VOXI, the company opted to introduce a journey that allows people to order a free, blank SIM card that they will have to activate later with a plan by coming back to the website.
Extensive research and analysis done in-house and by external agencies pointed out that users want an easier way to buy SIM-only plans without having to ‘figure out’ a way onto a plan. However, because the free SIM journey was the only one offered, there was hesitancy from the business to introduce a different way of acquiring plans.
The challenge was to introduce a way for people to buy plans in a single visit, whilst minimising the impact on trading, largely led by the free SIM journey.
Glossary
Free SIM journey: a process in which users order a blank SIM card without a plan, and come back to the website later when they are ready to buy (or activate it with) a plan
Single visit journey: a journey that gives users the ability to buy a plan on a single visit, essentially skipping the activation step
CRO: Conversion rate optimisation. An A/B test program that allows small changes in the experience to be tested against a set KPI to get more users through the funnel
The process
• Journey analysis to create a point of view and spot opportunities for optimisation using the following data sources:
1. Website analytics
2. Competitor research (conducted by an external agency)
3. Brand insights (such as NPS data, consideration metrics, external surveys and customer care)
4. Competitor analysis
• Hypothesis and test plan creation
• Designs and prototypes
• Live test
My role in this project
Lead UX designer: Maurizio Lavalle
• Analysis, including pulling website analytics data and interpreting it
• Ideating and hypothesising
• Reviewing and offering feedback to junior UX designer
• Stakeholder management
What’s the problem, you ask?
I carried out an in-depth analysis on the main journeys of the website to get a point of view of what the main user pain points are and where are the biggest drop-offs in the journey. This analysis exercise resulted in a 125-page document highlighting the most problematic areas of these journeys, why they happen and proposed recommendations for optimisation.
Amongst other things, in this analysis I concluded:
• The path of understanding the acquisition journey is not clear for visitors to the website
• Getting the desired plan is complex, which discourages visitors to convert
• The lack of a CTA on each plan card caused frustration to visitors as they were seen tapping/clicking everywhere on plan cards with no way to move forward in the journey
• Even after people figure out the proposition, only half of them come back to the website to activate their SIMs, and around 40% of these users successfully activate their SIM with a plan.
• Conversion rate in this journey was disproportionate to the amount of traffic
It became clear that people want a quick and easy interaction with a purchase journey that allows them to buy our plans in the most frictionless manner possible.
An A/B test
Once we had a better understanding of what was one of the biggest pain points in the acquisition journey, my team and I started ideating how we could offer users the option to buy plans in a single visit without causing too much disruption to the journey and the business.
We decided that because of the high amount of traffic on the page, this could be a good candidate for an A/B test and learn from real life sessions if there’s an appetite for a new purchase journey.
From here, we re-shuffled priorities in our test backlog and, after aligning with the e-commerce team and senior management at VOXI and Vodafone, the single journey order test became the biggest priority for the business.
The hypothesis
By having the option to buy a plan from the plans page, we reduce friction, which will result in more ‘buy it now’ orders without impacting total activations.
Designs
The creation of the UI was assigned to the junior UX designer in the team. She and I worked together to bring the test ideas to life, whilst I mentored her on UX best practices and offered feedback in review sessions I set up to make sure the project was delivered in time and met stakeholders’ expectations.
These review sessions would allow me to get a view on the progress of the user story during the sprint, and report back to the PO, who helped us remove blockers and keep us aligned to timelines before the designs were ready to be handed-off to the development team.
We explored two ideas:
1. Adding two CTAs in plan cards, based on the ‘Hobston’s choice’ theory, where the main CTA was ‘Buy it now’, whilst the secondary one was ‘Order a free SIM’
2. Adding a CTA in each plan card, with a label ‘Choose this plan’, that opened up a modal to show both purchase options, offering more explanation on what each mean
Hobston's Choice approach
Hobston’s Choice
Pros:
• Light touch implementation
• Simple design
Cons:
• Hard to understand the free SIM journey
• Too aggressive of an approach
'Choose this plan' modal
Choose this plan
Pros:
• Adds clarity to both options
• Allows users to focus on how to get the plan, rather than which plan to get
• Keeps users on the page before they are ready to make a choice
Cons:
• Adds an extra step to the journey
The final decision was made on the second variant as it offered more clarity on what’s expected in each option, but also allowed us to be more conservative in our approach, as users were widely used to having the free SIM journey as a way to get onto a plan.
Final iteration of the design
The results
Test specs:
• Traffic split: 70-30 (first three days), 50-50 (onwards)
• Run rate: 9 days
• Conversion uplift: +15% vs. control
Orders coming from ‘single visit journey’, and activations coming from the ‘free SIM journey’ showed a 50-50 split. The test uplifted conversions (total activations) by 15%, which allowed the business to hit and surpass its monthly trading forecast in the 9 days the test was live.
The new journey was implemented on the live website and, since then, the split of orders coming from the ‘singe visit’ journey has had peaks of 65% compared to ‘free SIM’.
The huge success of this test can be attributed to the great effort put into empathising with users from beginning to end, the ability to prioritise changes to the experience with the highest added value and impact to users and considerable collaboration amongst teams within the company that allowed ideas to grow from a data point to an enhanced digital experience.