project_bellsouthBellSouth knew that high numbers of people were abandoning their website in the midst of ordering or modifying their telephone service. They faced a tedious, confusing, and restrictive process at www.bellsouth.com. The goal of this project, undertaken by my team at Razorfish, was to evaluate the problems and then completely overhaul the ordering experience to deliver a world-class solution.

I planned and managed the usability sessions that formed the basis for this project. My analysis of the findings resulted in our winning the contract to do the design work.

The most prominent insight from the testing was that people abandoned the site due to a lack of ways to research products, services, and pricing before committing to an order. After being awarded the design work, I worked on a team to conceive of, propose, and design a new model for the ordering process. This model transformed the process from a loose, unrelated, and restrictive collection of sequential steps into a non-linear browsing/shopping model, combined with an order completion module.

While the interaction design in and of itself was a stimulating challenge, an equally challenging aspect of this project was the process of advocating this model to the client, educating them over a period of several weeks in order to get their buy-in and full support for all that the new model implied (in terms of operational and technical changes).

Activities

Developed flow diagrams; conducted paper prototyping; conducted functional prototyping. Dramatically reduced review cycles through use of clickable schematics, produced in Excel.

September 2003 – December 2003 (Usability test sessions)

May 2004 – August 2004 (Site re-design)

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Artifacts

Clickable Schematics (zip file, 111k)

Screenshots: BeforeAfter

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