Creating guidelines for the UX team while implementing new tariffs for O2 Slovakia

O2 Slovakia is with over 2.3 million mobile customers the second biggest mobile service provider in the Slovak Republic and has been active since 2007. Popular amongst its customers, O2 Slovakia wins the Operator of the Year award every year thanks to its simple and transparent product portfolio.

During my cooperation with IdeaSense (now part of Creative Dock) on a project for O2 Slovakia, our job was to supervise the implementation of new tariffs, explore the role of their UX designers, and teach the UX team to work with the design and continue to work on it without our assistance in the future.

User Experience

Product Design

User Interface

While we were delving deep to get well acquainted with the inner processes, internal communication, and structure in O2 Slovakia, we found out that the UX designer was seen as “the craftsman” who just completes an assigned task. He or she was expected to deliver it as the final UI design on top of that. The distinction between UX and UI was lacking.

We redefined the role of their UX designers and made a clear distinction between UX and UI. We literally took the UX designer and forbade them from working on UI design, so they could fully focus on UX. This resulted in the need to hire a UI designer who would closely cooperate with the UX designer.

But our task was even bigger: to create new guidelines on how the entire UX process in O2 should operate

We divided this transformation into five phases, gradually improving tasks, including hiring new team members with the necessary skills so they wouldn't have to rely on external consultants. This led to another need: to define and describe each phase of this process. Therefore, we created a guidebook that anyone in the company can access and see if they are working on the right task, making it clearer for new people during onboarding, too.

We also connected the UX designers with other teams and departments so they could study the entire process and create quick prototypes, test them, and provide findings before the project moved on to the next phase. Working closely with UI designers and UX testers, while being fully able to focus on their strongest skills: UX design itself. Once we made it possible for UX designers to be present at the moment of idea creation and could join the process early on, they could, for example, understand the product's needs better right from the start, do quick prototyping and testing to determine if the implementation of any idea made sense.

And not just once. With every new spin and twist of the product, they could use prototypes or wireframes to evaluate how well the change benefits the product. This shift helped the UX designers become more involved in the whole process of product creation and benefit other departments of O2 Slovakia from idea creation to final design and, therefore, bring their full potential on board.