User Experience Designer
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Designing a portal for the A1 Business Customers

Designing a Portal For A1 Business Customers

 

My role in a nutshell

  • Dashboard UI

  • “Vision Wireframes”, an idea I introduced to bridge the point we were in our UX and where we wanted to go in a year from now

  • Requirements gathering and workshops with stakeholders

  • Introduced design system alignment meetings in A1

 
 

 

Creating a Platform for the Business Customers of A1

 

 

A1 is one of the biggest telecommunication companies in Austria. Apart from private customers, they also have businesses as customers, which range from one-person-businesses to companies with multiple locations and thousands of employees. The business customers have so far been served by A1 sales representatives which offered support and customised service packages for each customer. To make a purchase, an upgrade or procurements, a corporate customer had to call to the A1 customer service and do a lot of the paperwork through the phone. Two years ago, A1 started the Mein A1 Business Project, which aims to be a one-stop-shop for the business customers to manage all their transactions and data all in one place.
My main task was to understand the business requirements and create together with my colleagues at DigitalBeratung, a remote development team and with feasibility and speed in mind, the best possible user experience. You can also have a look at my Behance post about this project.

 
 

What I did

When I joined the project, there was already a first release in place. My role has been two fold - on one hand, I took care of the immediate needs of the MA1B. We worked with the scrum methodology and in each sprint we wrote or collaborated on UX stories to correct UX issues or to describe the design of new product pages that we need to build. In the stories that I write for each sprint, I had in mind the question “which change can we make now to the system that will bring the maximum benefit and require the minimum development effort?”. For example, observing that there are a lot of tables in our interfaces, I proposed to change the way we are registering addresses in order to save space and to connect each entry with the corresponding location on the map page. This change was applied and improved many of the product pages and required minimum development effort.

The other part of my work is about planning long-term. When I first joined the project, I realised that while we had ideas on the kind of platform we wanted to build, it wasn’t very specific so it had to be visualised. At that point, I proposed to develop the “Vision Wireframes” which would describe our vision for some key parts of the platform in one year from now. The Vision Wireframes would still be realistic but not fully confined from the current status of development. My colleagues and me worked together with product owners and other stakeholders to develop some key Vision Wireframes which were later used as part of the selling material to attract new clients. Another long-term initiative was that I helped the A1 stakeholders to understand the value of a design system and kickstart the process for a unified A1 Design System that will bring all platforms together, under a consistent user experience. I started the process by auditing our platform and discussing the chasm between A1 for private customers vs. Mein A1 business customers. This proved to be a complex task, as there are many additional small platforms and product owners to bring together. The Design System meetings triggered the decision from the management to merge many of these platforms. This is an ongoing project that includes meetings, UI audits, deciding for the tooling and involving developers and stakeholders.