Customer Need

“I want to manage my digital lifestyle.”

Business Need

Rexamine AT&T’s app ecosystem and redesign the flagship consumer app: myAT&T.

Solution

Workshops and a 238 page report of job stories, customer journeys, wires, comps and more around AT&T’s app ecosystem.


AT&T came to us looking for strategy, design and tech recommendations for their 46 mobile apps.

First, I researched the combined ecosystem, finding redundancies and looking for future improvements. A developer helped me write a script to pull all the app analytics into a spreadsheet for analysis. Some apps had not been updated in over a year. Some apps had very low ratings. We felt these apps could be eliminated or integrated into other apps. I asked our strategist to gather app reviews. We cross referenced them with the quantitative data. Doing research separately limited confirmation bias at this early stage.

Our leadership team put together a deck for a kickoff workshop. We had a lot of good strategic thinking, but I saw a need for more interactivity with the client. I added stakeholder interviews, crazy 8s and SWOT analysis. The goal was to build consensus and make our stakeholders feel invested in the process.

We learned a lot for the two day kickoff workshop. It was now time to synthesize our findings. We cross referenced them to identify 5 key areas of improvement:

Login, Customer Support, Billing, Streaming, Shop & Upgrade.

We outlined how our deliverables would build toward the final presentation:

  1. Stakeholder interviews give us Business Needs

  2. App ratings, analytics & usability studies give us Customer Needs

  3. Wunderman Thompson’s expertise & competitive analyses give us Best Practices

  4. We define our Areas of Improvement by cross-referencing Business Needs, Customer Needs and Best Practices

  5. Job Stories distill key issues and scenarios from the Areas of Improvement

  6. Customer Journeys imagine a real world example of a user fufilling the Job Stories

  7. Wireframes illustrate the screens from the Customer Journeys

  8. Technical Analysis provides recommendations on how development will address the Areas of Improvement

  9. Design System (view here) applied to the Wireframes provides rules and guidelines for how the Prototype will be designed

  10. Prototype demonstrates scenarios and solutions from Job Stories, Customer Journeys and Technical Analysis

We met with our stakeholders weekly to update them on our progress and receive feedback. As the project went on, they decided to narrow focus on the myAT&T app.

The ecosystem project exemplifies my ideal design process. The client came to us with a massive problem and trusted us as a team to solve it. We did so based on research, not hunches.

Early on our team felt that many of the apps should be removed from the store all together. While I still think that is true, the client didn’t follow through. Ultimately that would have been too large of a task, with too little of a benefit for them.

That “failure” led me to an important breakthrough. In an organization of that size:

It’s better to create guidelines than barriers.

Siloed teams within AT&T were going to spin up new apps no matter what. Instead of being gatekeepers, it made more sense to give them the tools to succeed. That’s why the design system pitch I created is my favorite deliverable of the project, even if it wasn’t as implemented as widely as I hoped.

Our stakeholders had more control over the myAT&T app than the rest of the ecosystem. The flagship saw the most change when the project ended. Every day millions of people use it to shop and pay bills. Our recommendations vastly improved the visual design, navigation and usability for them.

I learned a lot on this project. I learned how to work better with their teams and ours. I learned more about strategy and design. I learned that sometimes the best process still won’t yield all the results you hoped for.