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After Sales Center 2.0 launched, a larger team of UX designers, researchers, and content strategists was assembled for a larger and more holistic approach to new & existing customer plan management and the purchase flow. I joined as a vast amount of research and wireframes were already completed, and brought a new-to-Comcast UX designer under me to the team. We primarily worked on the plan management portion of the larger work track, called Plan Builder 2.0.
What is Plan Builder 2.0?
Previously, the way that Xfinity customers purchase or manage their plans was first dependent on which division they resided in due to differences in the ways that offers are constructed across divisions, among other reasons. Aside from our preconfigured and merchandized offers, there were two applications that a customer (or agent) would experience to view and select their plan — All Offers or Plan Builder.
All Offers is a full stack of all available offers that can be filtered and sorted. While this has the perk of total transparency to the customer, research time and again showed that customers often felt paralyzed by the sheer number of choices and promotions. It also lacked any personalization, merchandizing, or informational learn content.
Plan Builder was an initial attempt to offer customers a modular shopping experience where they could a la carte build their own bundle. This is a preferred shopping model for some customer types, however the first version of the application was limited by the backend and the way that the offers were constructed. The modularity was actually faked on the frontend and the application worked more as a filtering system behind the scenes. Again this experience lacked personalization, merchandizing, or informational learn content.
My role
My role on this project was to take the existing research and wires and work through more refined wireframes, lead overall visual design, create prototypes for further user research, extend & align with the still evolving Xfinity Design System, document all use cases & flows, work closely with our product and engineering teams, and delegate tasks to other designers.
The future state experience is truly modular shopping for all customer type, across all divisions. To enable this, Plan Builder 2.0 was not only a frontend update, but also a new modernized offer structure. Both All Offers and the original Plan Builder would be deprecated and replaced by the new Plan Builder 2.0.
Foundational Research
Existing research and journey mapping
Needing to quickly onboard to the project, I reviewed tomes of
foundational research, explored competitor experiences,
and interviewed my UX and product team members.
Then I could began the wireframe & visual design process.
Key Findings
Users generally have FOMO and want to ensure they’re getting the best value possible
They dislike one size fits all plans with unnecessary add-ons
Users want a plan tailored to their needs where they can save money
Prior Research
Shopping Model Research, February ‘21
Plan Builder 1.0, April ‘21
Shopping Paths, May ‘21
Join Concept Research, June ‘20
Join Journey Experience, January ‘21
Price Transparency, March ‘20
Xfinity Foundational Research, ‘21
Featured Deals Research, ‘21
Wireframes & designs
Initial wires were wildly explorational. Was Plan Builder 2.0 to be heavily visual, like shopping for a car — or should it be laser focused on being a transactional application? Where and how did educational content fit in? How should promotions and discounts be layered into the experience? What were the best UI mechanisms for selections? Every option was explored in this early phase.
Sometimes the design process include dead ends, or explorations that have to be tabled for future iterations.
For Plan Builder 2.0, an early concept of mine was an attempt at gamifying the often confusing or hidden discounts embedded in offers. While not apart of MVP, this exploration will still help inform future iterations of Plan Builder.
After rounds of review with product, development, and stakeholders, we aligned as a team on a layout and I moved to visual design. It was at this phase we started inviting users to experience my work-in-progress designs through moderated research.
Collapsed cart
A key finding was that no matter how many times I iterated on designs with arrows or buttons or text to indicate that the cart was expandable, users were not looking for an expandable cart at this moment in their journey.
The true work had to be done on the page — clarity of pricing information on the offer tiles tied with the Monthly Total were what users needed.
Deselecting tiles was not natural for all users
My initial designs had users simply de-select tiles to remove a line of business, but surprisingly research indicated some users were confused.
To alleviate this, myself and a designer under my direction iterated on options for solving this. In a second round of research, having Remove and Undo links better resonated with all users and was a complete success.
Value props seen as ads
My initial designs for our value props were glossed over by users and they told us they thought they were just banner ads.
A small enhancement to reduce this, which avoided a development cycle, was to swap imagery for iconography and to reduce the amount of copy to just a simple headline and CTA.
Outside of research and optimization,
another area of focus of mine was to create a system that was flexible and extendable with components that are reusable and consistent.
This documentation was extended beyond just Plan Builder 2.0 and into the larger design system.
Final designs
Next steps
Continue to evolve, learn, and optimize
- Simplify and improve navigation between lines of business
- Add new features like equipment management
- Continue to evolve merchandizing system
- Respond to customer verbatims and analytics to find areas of opportunity