The online shop at O2.co.uk has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. As customer expectations for seamless and frictionless online shopping continues to rise, O2 has set an ambition to keep one step ahead of the competition.
Customers don’t just want purchases, they want experiences. They want them faster, easier, simpler and better than ever before.
And brands that deliver exceptional experiences are leading the way.
In a fast moving market O2 needed to be continuously innovating and crafting industry leading experiences that customers would love, again and again.
The project kicked off with a collaborative Empathise phase to unpick the current O2 shop experience and identify the problems it faced. We led stakeholder workshops to gather insights and requirements, resolve any conflict, and rally everyone behind a clear project vision. The team reviewed countless documents to extract insights to form hypotheses, identify opportunities and influence the later phases of the project. Co-creation sessions resulted in the development of online specific proto-personas and highlighted issues with the current shop user journeys used to form the basis of the product backlog. We also conducted extensive customer insight gathering, including store visits (staff and buyer interviews), analytics data, ethnographic research, and user-testing. The learnings from these activities were used to Define the project’s business and customer outcomes and gave us a clear roadmap of problems and opportunities that we could map our solutions against.
The team rapidly developed concepts that addressed the defined problems: tackling user tasks and flows, designing new features and functionality and reimagining the user interface across the whole experience. Concepts were shared, discussed, reviewed with O2s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), refined, tested and presented to stakeholders with many being selected either for the Materialise phase or as concepts to be developed as part O2’s Digital Transformation roadmap. They were also validated based on best practice considerations, such as accessibility and mobile-first implementation.
The team rapidly developed concepts that addressed the defined problems: tackling user tasks and flows, designing new features and functionality and reimagining the user interface across the whole experience. Concepts were shared, discussed, reviewed with O2s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), refined, tested and presented to stakeholders with many being selected either for the Materialise phase or as concepts to be developed as part O2’s Digital Transformation roadmap. They were also validated based on best practice considerations, such as accessibility and mobile-first implementation.
We produced and delivered a robust set of principles, and a dev-friendly UI toolkit to support new streamlined journeys to enhance and help improve the customer experience. As well as for this O2 Shop project, this work has gone on to act as the foundation for a larger design system used for UX and UI across Accelerate O2: O2’s digital transformation programme – their biggest business and platform overhaul to date.
