BT Group | Multiple Sclerosis Society
Content Designer
BT Group
Where user needs meet business goals
The role
Content designer at BT Group, working in the Consumer Digital Division as part of two squads: EE Upgrade SIM and EE Home Broadband.
The problem
How could we make it easier for customers to compare and choose a SIM plan?
Insight from user research (structured interviews and usability testing of the live journey) and data from Hotjar and Adobe Analytics showed that some users were dropping out of the Upgrade SIM journey because they found it too hard to compare SIM plans.
The goal
Increase conversion by making it easier for users to compare and choose a plan.
My input
From the findings of our user interviews, I confirmed that users considered data and price to be the most important parts of a SIM plan.
I worked with our product designer to create simplified plan cards that focused on these elements. I liaised with Regulatory and Legal Teams to ensure the simplified cards complied with their requirements.
We put our new plan cards live to 50% of users through an A/B test. Conversion increased by 9%. But while looking into the test data with stakeholders in our Commercial Team, I found that although conversion had increased, the proportion of higher-value plans with inclusive benefits had fallen. We felt we were meeting user need, but not hitting the business goal.
BT’s Design Team follows the principles of Build, Measure, Learn so we set out to improve the experience again.
I re-analysed the usability testing and noticed that users stumbled when looking at the names of plans – Essential for a basic plan, and Smart for a plan that included a benefit such as a Netflix subscription. Because the plan names didn’t mean anything to the user, they glossed over the differences. As well as costing the business revenue, this also meant users were missing an opportunity to save money. For example, someone with an EE plan and a Netflix subscription could save £2 a month by having that subscription as part of their plan, instead of directly with Netflix.
Working with the product designer, we evolved our simplified plan cards into a Build Your Own SIM feature that not only enabled easy comparison of data and price, but also created space to better explain the benefits of Smart plans.
The outcome
In an A/B test to 50% of our audience, the Build Your Own Sim feature increased conversion by 4% and increased customer value by £2.24 per customer per month.
MS Society
Blogs for the MS community, by the MS community
The role
Digital Editor at the Multiple Sclerosis Society, using content design skills to meet the needs of the MS community.
The problem
How could we create a blogging strategy to increase engagement by ensuring that our volunteer bloggers reflected the community they were writing for?
Volunteer bloggers had come through various routes, with no systematic approach to recruitment. This meant we were unsure whether the bloggers accurately represented the MS community, in demographics, location, type of MS, and interests. If we had gaps, then we were likely missing out on opportunities for engagement.
My input
I delved into data and research. First, I recorded the characteristics of our existing bloggers and the topics they had written about over the previous year.
Then I set about finding out as much as possible about our audience. I used Google Analytics to look at location data and used the most visited parts of the site to infer information about type of MS and interests. I used Google Trends to find out what topics were searched for in connection with MS.
I used our online forums and social media as another source of data: what topics were most discussed?
I validated this desk-based research with user research, sending a survey to our existing bloggers and our wider campaigning community and holding one online focus group with five members of the MS community.
The outcome
I created a blogging strategy, covering:
the missing characteristics we needed to look for in new volunteers
a prioritised list of topics to cover in blog series
a social media plan for how we would share new content
We recruited a new volunteer to cover the top topic along with one of our established bloggers. The blogs in this series, Sex and MS, were the most read that year.