Under tight timelines, too many agencies short-cut the steps in UX design. At UXReactor, even under time constraints, we lean into our proven process.

Here’s how we delivered a ground-breaking innovation for Nokia in eight months.

Our design starting place: To bring to reality a theoretical concept, not yet proven practical. After all, no one had done this before.

Our first task was to align the internal Nokia stakeholders around a user-centered approach to solving the problem. But historically, Nokia has been a technology and engineering-first organization.

What’s more, from R&D to engineering, product management, sales, and business development, different teams had different ideas of how the product should look.

Nokia’s teams are located across the US, UK, and Europe. So, the critical first step was to bring everyone together physically to kick off our collaboration and agree on how we would work across multiple domains and continents.

At the outset, UXReactor set the expectation. Before we’d even begin looking at the design, we needed to understand the users and the ecosystem.

Diving deep into the user research, we discovered that service operators experienced several challenges that ate into their time and caused frustration, especially when operators needed to identify root causes of customer issues.

The existing system presented customer and network data in silos, which meant operators had to painstakingly piece together different data sets to get the bigger picture of a customer’s problem. To do so, operators had to log in to many different tools, slowing their process.

We knew that to predict and resolve service issues, operators needed to see data in context, in a single tool. Yet, we were working with vast volumes of multidimensional data, which made it more difficult to streamline and simplify the operator’s experience.

It was this challenge that stymied our predecessors. They struggled with how to present so many different types of data in a way that would be useful for operators.

Drawing on our user research, the UXReactor team redesigned the framework to integrate operator workflows and tools into a single digital workspace — one that efficiently organizes data (no matter how complex) and presents operators with a cohesive, easy-to-understand picture of customer network experiences.

Next, we handed the designs to Nokia’s development team to create a working prototype.

Unfortunately, many product teams and design agencies check user validation off the list at the end of the development process or even after delivery.

The only way to develop a user-accepted product was to get the prototype in front of real users well before the delivery deadline. So, we installed the system prototype in the UK phone carrier’s environment. Then, we sat with their network operators over three days while they put it through its paces.

Operators said things like, “I would have to sign into five different applications just to get the amount of information I can now see on this one screen.”

That’s exactly what we wanted to hear.

User validation always surfaces opportunities to improve a product.

But by the end of that round of testing, we knew the new platform would radically transform the user experience of service operators — who, in turn, would deliver a measurably better customer experience.

Our next step was to make design updates based on feedback. Nokia’s dev team then took the product to the finish line.
As Vinay Draksharam, Sr. eXperience Design Strategist at UXReactor, explains:

UXReactor delivered the designs on deadline, despite the tight timelines, and Nokia took the product to the finish line.

With the new eSOC — branded as the Nokia Experience Center — Sophie no longer has to log into five different tools to understand why you aren’t getting reception. She now has a real-time 360° view of your customer experience and service quality in a single workspace.

That means Sophie can get to the root cause of your issue far more efficiently.

You spend less time waiting on the phone, and Sophie gives you clear answers (which helps to dissipate your frustration). Better still, she can resolve your issue faster.

For the first time, Sophie and other service operators can also predict network service issues. She can let you know ahead of time if there’s likely to be a problem. That proactive communication makes you feel the phone carrier cares about your customer experience.

Naturally, Nokia’s customer, the phone carrier, also benefits. You’re less likely to switch carriers, so they profit from customer retention.

The carrier saves costs because a single operator can monitor about 30,000 customer experiences at once and serve callers in less time.

Those operators are not only more efficient — they now have more job satisfaction. The eSOC is intuitive, and it empowers people like Sophie to be truly effective at their work. She can make confident, data-driven decisions that ultimately improve customer happiness.

More ease, lower costs, more profitability...

All of this is possible only because Nokia had a radical vision of an evolved Service Operating Center. And they trusted in design to bring that innovation to life.