Voice Everywhere
In an effort to retain current customers and gain new ones, our business partners came to the UX team looking for guidance on researching, creating, and launching a new telephony product. This product would serve as the flagship of the company’s “Voice Transformation” initiative that would encompass all telephony and voice services Cox provides.
In an effort to retain current customers and gain new ones, our business partners came to the UX team looking for guidance on researching, creating, and launching a new telephony product. This product would serve as the flagship of the company’s “Voice Transformation” initiative that would encompass all telephony and voice services Cox provides.
What It is
New telephony product that allows users to connect their home phone to their mobile device.
Goals
Increase phone subscribers by providing convenient tools to make the service more accessible.
Who It’s For
All Cox phone subscribers.
Hurdles
Designing a brand unique experience for an already established universal pattern.
Exploration & Research
This opportunity allowed our team to research not only the usability of the product, but consumer insights on how to better position a legacy product like telephone and bring it into the 21st century. This unique position allowed us to utilize more in depth testing methods such as
psychophysiological feedback. In turn the final product provides an updated experience that fits seamlessly into modern consumer habits.
Embracing Gestures
As the trend of bezelless phones brings in a new era of interactions with varying degrees of gestures and pressure, I took this opportunity to test and implement this new standard of interaction within the new product. By removing the standard bottom navigation and creating prominence for the “swipe up to go home” feature of the iPhone X, I was able to move the primary navigation to the top of the screen. This way, the user is now offered two ways to navigate the app: by either swiping left to right to move through each page or by simply tapping the screen.
In-depth Research of Exploratory Design & Competitive Research
The Cox Voice Everywhere app tested well in the past with a SUS score of “Exceeds Expectations”. While users found it easy to use, we wanted to enhance the overall look and feel from the initial designs.
The aim of the secondary research initiative was twofold. First, we completed a competitive review to see how we compared with a few of our leading competitors and leverage our own user insights to see what does and doesn’t work well within our competitors products.
Next, we evaluated several exploratory designs that experimented with interaction and UI. Our goal was to learn how users responded to various design alternatives by measuring their emotional response to each exploratory design and determine whether we could maintain our current usability scores.
Preparation & Testing
Working closely with our lead researcher, I determined which necessary user tasks would provide relevant insights and created the test script. In doing so, I created 7 prototypes, 3 for our competitors’ products and 4 versions of the Voice Everywhere app.
Our testing focused on 2 primary quantitative metrics SUS and BERT. This allowed us to monitor and maintain the usability of the product while also monitoring emotional responses to the new UI and interactions.
Psychophysiological Measures
To provide an even more in depth study, we teamed up with Georgia State University to conduct in person user testing with psychophysiological measures. This in turn provided our team a deeper insight into the unconscious responses of users as well as a multitude of other pertinent pieces of research we were able to apply to the Voice Everywhere app.
Results
When compared to the original baseline app, our analysis revealed that the “Top Nav” design iteration was successful at increasing the aesthetic enjoyment without sacrificing any perceived usability of the app.
