Project Overview
Most Hong Kong telcos’ websites are business-centric, cluttered by promotional banners from their forever-increasingly complex offerings. These websites also reflect the ways these telcos are being run - with different silo business units competing for customers’ attention within a limited site space.
Yet today’s customers care less about that but demand a user experience that allows them to do what they want to do (functional) or find what they need to find in the smoothest possible way (delightful). This new experience is exactly what IBM iX helped Three Mobile HK to create with their new website, via the use of functional widgets, storytelling content, and user-centric information architecture.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
IBM iX, your global business design partner.
When change is constant, companies need to constantly change. We help our clients design for the future while evolving their existing businesses. We work at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and technology to help our clients digital reinvent their business. Partner with us to define your strategy, create exceptional experiences, and build your business, by design.
Project Team:
Eric Ma, Vera Chan, Bob Lukasik, Buelent Aydindag, Kenneth Chen, Sherman Lee, Michael Tam, Francis Tan, Yves Chu, Kuan Lee, Belinda Chan, Bryan Nguyen, Doris Fung, Laurens Bouwkamp, Terry Chu, and Mandy Chan.
Project Brief
The three.com.hk website has not been updated for more than 10 years. Packed with promotional banners and a very cluttered information architecture, the site was very business-focused rather than addressing real user needs. To redesign their website, simply updating to a modern design style would not be sufficient as today’s customers are expecting a fully modern approach to user-centric services from their mobile service providers.
Hence IBM iX engaged this project with a business transformation approach - by applying our Enterprise Design Thinking methodology, we brought in user research insights as the foundation for the design and allowed multi-disciplinary stakeholder teams to co-create the solutions. Concurrent with this UX design phase, building a new Content Management System (CMS) to enable such new way of working as part of a complete end-to-end business transformation for Three Mobile HK.
Project Innovation/Need
Our journey took us to activities that identify the nuances and pain points of the old design. To address those both IBM iX and Three collaborated in multiple levels to come up with a meaningful purpose for the website. To intuitively take the user to where they want to go. With this purpose in mind, we set out to establish 3 main principles for the design of the website.
ESTABLISH HIERARCHY. Create a visual sense of hierarchy so that users can be guided to where they need to go base on the most common content and topics.
A CLEAR DIRECT PATH. We can now take the user to directly where they want to go. From the drop-down navigation menu and from the brand new homepage widgets, the user can be taken all the way down to the exact page that they want to see.
PROMOTIONS AS VISUAL ELEMENTS. Repurpose promotional banners and convert them from a perceived visual noise into attractive visual elements strategically placed throughout the website.
Design Challenge
Customers visiting a telco website expect to find and navigate to content that helps them achieve their immediate needs. Over the years, the aging three.com.hk website had become a mesh of deeply hidden content, and even worse a sea of disorganised banners all shouting out and fighting for attention from the now lost and confused customer.
Restructure the content and information architecture, bringing out the key categories of content customers are looking for, and provide an easy intuitive navigation to reach all such content within a couple of clicks.
For example, through our user research, we learned that 90% of the customers' main intent when visiting the website are to simply check their monthly phone bills. This kind of insights informed our design decisions that led us to create functional widgets like a direct Check Bill module on the homepage that places the priority to satisfy user needs above all.
However, such experience designs also require both business and technology transformation from Three Mobile HK. To meet this challenge, we build a new CMS that allows different key business units to contribute content in a more timely manner and also facilitate the client teams to explore a new working model that allows such new functional widgets to work within their organizational structure.
Future Impact
Declutter the site by removing the competing banners and allowing promotional messages only in relevant sections, and use interactive widgets to provide recommendations and easily digestible content. A mobile-first, responsible web experience that takes the users to where they want to go.
Recognized as the Most Innovative Mobile Site by MOB-Ex Awards, and the ROI Awards in Shanghai China, for achieving a balance between Creativity and Corporate Resources.
Service - Corporate
This award celebrates creative and innovative solution design for the successful delivery and provision of services. Consideration given to system integration, user experience, product design
More Details