Swapables – Preparing for EE

ORANGE | TELECOMMS

The challenge

As part of the Orange offering, Swapables were a type of benefits package that gave the customer access to services like music, films, TV and other special offers.

This endeavour required the alignment of multiple teams and organisations. As a junior designer, this task was a tricky one.

How to align multiple teams, with politics, competitiveness and brand execution all regular features?

Discovery / getting-started

There were several teams working on this project, notably:

• The Orange Shop digital team (the team I was part of)
• An agency creating a micro-site
• The team who managed the proposition itself
• Communications teams managing emails, etc
• Orange retail stores

The challenge here was to try and get everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. Orange had a long track record of successful proposition launches, and this was one of the more complex in the latter days of the brand. The timescale to launch was very tight, so the experience needed to be knit together across several touch-points in a large organisation.

Taking the user’s perspective

Here is an idea of the initial user flows, with a mixture of internally and externally managed web-pages. There were various teams managing these touch-points. It was clear from this flow that there were several elements of interdependency. Technical diagrams are great for development teams, however to communicate with the wider business management, other approaches were needed.

Design delivery

The Panther plan was inserted into the Orange phone buying journey at several key points, while being balanced against messaging and promotions at the time related to iPhone and Samsung phones.

I was responsible for designing the new elements that would appear on these pages and providing detailed, annotated mockups for the development and content production teams to review.

In the image below, you can see a snapshot of how the strategy was to send users to the Swapables micro-site to learn more about the benefits as it was felt the Orange Shop itself didn’t have the real-estate or features to do the proposition justice. Microsites were common practice for marketing campaigns, and when the routes in and out of them were poorly managed, users oculd get stuck going around a website they never intended to visit. In this case, as the routes were mapped out in advance, the user was always propmpted to contue down a positive path to purchase.

Results

A great team execution, with successful take up by customers of the Panther plan / Swapables which became one of Orange UK’s most popular plans

Swapables as a proposition looked great on paper, with lots of engaging options for customers. Due to the work the team and I put into aligning all of the various touchpoints (which was a very rare thing back then), the proposition performed very well becoming the most popular plan choice for Orange customers.

However, network speeds were not yet fast enough to support the digital content streaming. Watching Sky Sports over a 3G connection at the time was a particularly poor experience with very low resolution video. The new EE brand to be launched a few months later would fix that problem, enabling much better streaming quality.

Several learnings from the Orange Swapables proposition fed into EE’s digital content propositions and subscriptions included with EE plans, so the project had great overall value. It was a valuable learning on team cohesion and rapid execution before both of those qualities were needed for the launch of EE.