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2 Billion views, 53 Million users, 130,000 touch points.
Designed and led mixed method research (quant and qual contextual user interviews) at national level on a mobile platform where customers preview and test phones in a retail setting. Recommendations led to new strategy and design.

AT&T Device Alive

2021-2023

AT&T

Status: In Production

SITUATION


AT&T is one of the largest mobile retailers and connectivity providers in the world. They sell millions of mobile devices per year.

There is a sweet-spot in device retail, an alignment between customer and business needs, where customers can test out phones in the stores and retailers can advertise the phone, its specs/features, and even other products and services. Walk in to any tech retail store, from Apple to Best Buy, and you’ll see what I mean. A platform that educated and shows off the capabilities of the device to the customers plus allows companies to "get the word out" on marketing needs.

Our company launched a version of this experience for AT&T Retail in the late 20-teens.

But did it work? How well?
With all of the eyes it gets, is it helping?
Is it leading to conversion?

TASK

What we did: Nationwide, in context, 360°, Qual, Quant,
I designed and led a nationwide field study to understand users' needs (customers & sales reps). My team gathered insights through:
- user interviews/testing in context
- quantitative metrics
- competitive analysis

RESEARCH
Beginning in 2020, I led a team in an ongoing exploration of this experience and others like it in retail in the form of a competitive analysis, field research, quant data collection, and AT&T staff interviews. The research output was a strategic redesign to align the experience to the way people shop for phones.

INSIGHTS
We found the answer to the above questions to be, well sort of.

COGNITIVE
Video loop with brand, device, and ad content - People aren’t seeing content. They just picked up the phones and played with them.
Home page containing pricing, specs, savings - People were ignoring it and closing the experience almost immediately.
Recall was abysmal for ad and phone related content, even savings/deals. They found content valuable when we showed it to them, but they just weren’t seeing it. Pricing, deals, features, specs like memory and battery life - all make a huge difference in purchase decisions. People testing out phones would even use the phone to google that information which was on the screen they’d just closed. But we found that open search as a discovery tool didnt provide as rich information as a curated (one-stop-shop) for all data.

BEHAVIORAL
What is their physical behavior?
Most people know what they want (or need to compare between 2-3 phones) before they come into the store. Their visit is based on the tactile.They like to test, touch, feel.
They test the phones in the way that they use them in their daily lives. Most commonly used features include, camera, text, browser.

EMOTIONAL
People were impacted by feel. They move around the store picking up and testing phones judging how they “feel.” It’s brand connection, it’s caché, it’s how something makes one feel, even down to size and weight. People often made final decisions based on feel. If not that, they narrowed down their choices and decided based on one or two specs, like battery life or memory.

How to optimize a high exposure touchpoint for customers hoping to find a new mobile?
How do we cater to the users’ needs (and align to the business’s needs as well?
What is the highest and best use of this digital real estate?

We created a redesigned experience aligned with user needs and business strategy. We designed wireframes and worked with teams of designers and developers to prepare the handoff.

STRATEGY
The strategy was to bring the experience closer to peoples' natural shopping and browsing behavior. We wanted to make the experience more flexible and easier for users to explore, but prioritize the exploration through the catered experience, where it is easier to find relevant and helpful information compared to an open search.



NEXT GEN: IN DEVELOPMENT (Phase 1):

- A brand/product focused attract loop
- Incentivize interaction with the experience: landing page choose-your-own-path experience that lets users learn, compare features
- Striking visuals paired with good content - should make information stickier, better recall
- Clear buttons
- Content: Reorganize and prioritize, less is more
- Clean look and feel that focuses users on the information and experience
- Pages with enhanced details, images, etc. (compared to small text)
- Navigation - should be easy to use and persistent

THE FUTURE - Humanized Enhanced Reality Shopping (Phase 2):
- Personalize and Humanize: Create persona-based curated experiences where users can tour the phone highlighting the features that an avatar would use: social media power user, entrepreneur, on-the-go parent, etc.
- A pathway to purchase



Working with AT&T Retail national leadership, we are developing a rollout and orientation plan for store teams.

MORE INFORMATION

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LOGAN MONACO

EXPRNCE | RSCH | STRTGY | DSGN

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