Accessories Financing
This project was part of a pilot program to allow customers to purchase accessories and bundle them with their monthly phone plan. Instead of paying for the accessory separately, they can pay it off over the course of their phone contract.
Problem
There has been an increasing trend around ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ services that help customers with larger purchases. We want to bring that into our own Telus experiences and let customers bundle their accessories with their already existing phone contract.
goals
Better affordability because customers can purchase accessories at a lower upfront cost.
Currently no other wireless service providers (2023) offer financing options for accessories on their digital channels, giving Telus the competitive edge.
design process
Journey mapping
The accessories financing project lasted over the span of one year and required collaboration across all Telus Digital teams. I lead the design on the last step for cart and checkout. I worked very closely with our research & learn designers and content practitioners to come up with a UX solution to this new project.
We created journey maps that outlined all the possible scenarios that may come out of this experience. We made over 30 potential situations including any ‘unhappy paths’ or edge cases that the customer might come across. Our journey mapping was derived from the first happy path below.
Ideation
To reiterate out goals of this accessories financing project, we wanted to:
Increase accessory sales pairing with customer phone plans
Provide an easy breakdown of what they have to pay each month
I started working out some of the information architecture of our product cards on the cart page. I wanted to present customers with a usage bar so they can visualize how much financing threshold they have left. However, this idea would not work well as a lot of API calls would have needed to be made which would result in a slower page load.
The second option I designed was to place the financing threshold at the top of the product card so that customers would see their limit first. But with all the details and information already presented it would increase cognitive overload.
I refined the designs more and added a chevron link so customers could go back directly to the accessories catalogue pages and add more products if they wanted to. We ended up using this design to do usability testing.
This version only shows 1 accessory as it was for an existing customer who already had a phone contract and are now just adding an accessory to that same contract.
During design reviews, it was noted that the ‘financing maximum’ note at the top of the card could cause cognitive overload. There was a lot of information presented there such as the subscriber that the accessory is attached to, the financing maximum note, the name of the product and the price to name a few.
I had to pivot so that the financing maximum interaction be put at the bottom of the product card. This way customers can associate the note with the accessory first and not the phone. We added a tooltip to the end of the note to give customers additional information about financing their accessories and the maximum amount they can purchase.
I kept the link to allow customers to keep shopping for more accessories to give customers an opportunity use their financing maximum and purchase more accessories. After finalizing these designs, we performed usability testing on the entire flow. We used these designs for our first round of usability testing.
Usability Testing
Our first round of usability testing was successful, some main pieces of feedback we got for the cart page was:
Likes:
The price breakdown of how financing accessories works makes sense to the test participants
Understands that it will be added to their next billing cycle
Thinks the legal note is a helpful note to have
Improvements:
Important for the financing limit to be seen
Would like to know when the financing term ends
After the first round of usability testing, I refined the designs more and updated the copy. We began designing on mobile to ensure that our solution worked for mobile as well.
A lot of new information and rules of purchasing is presented to the customer in this particular flow. We wanted to ensure that we were capturing the most important information and our content prioritization helps guide the customer to the best of our ability.
We ran this version of the designs through a second round of usability testing with a different scenario. The usability testing results were overall positive. The participants understood how they can finance accessories and understood that it would be connected to their already existing phone plan. They described the flow as straightforward, which made it easy to purchase accessories. The participants suggested some minor improvements to the flow.
The updates we made were to change the legal note ‘1’ to a tooltip so it’s more visually prominent to the customers, with the tooltip icon - customers would be more intrigued to learn more rather than clicking on a legal note. We also updated the copy to be more succinct and tell the customer how much more of their financing limit they have left, instead of how much they’ve used.
FINAL PRODUCT
Around 3% of all mobility orders include financed accessories. Regular mobility orders have a 26.0% order completion rate. When customers have a financed accessory in their cart, the order completion rate increases by 4.8% at 30.8% - showing that customers are more likely to complete their orders when they also purchase an accessory.
Compared to the 6 months before this project launch, we only had 1305 phone and accessory orders. In the last 6 months after the project launch, we’ve had 3161 orders of phone and accessory bundles placed, meaning a 242% increase in orders.
Future improvements
I’d like to see a lean version of this experience. There was a lot of new information and content to be presented to the customer as well as many rules. I think if there was a way that we could simplify this so that it’s even easier for the customer. We also have a lot of technical setbacks within our cart and checkout which I wish we were able to work around. If possible, I would also redesign the cart product cards to provide more information to the customer about the actual product and to enable editing on the cart page.
REflections
This project pushed my own boundaries and tested what I knew, it was my first big project as a junior designer. We had a lot of pushback on this project as well due to technical feasibility, some of our original designs would not have worked. It was a good opportunity for me to learn about back-end processes, and work better with developers to create a product that works for our systems and is better user experience for our customers.
With this project I was also able to try out content strategy, our team didn’t have anyone specific in this role so it was interesting that I got to learn about information architecture and some UX writing.