Mobile App Rebranding and Onboarding Enhancements
PROJECT SUMMARY
Verizon is currently in the process of investing in a consolidation of their various family oriented applications (Smart Family, Gizmo, Smart Locator, Hum and Care Smart) in a single app called Verizon Family.
I have been the lead designer tackling the onboarding process for all existing and new parents and children of the apps. I have been actively helping with updating existing screens to the new rebranding change Verizon is going through, as well as implemented improvements to the current profile onboarding and maintenance flows.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Verizon is a brand that is driven by powering and empowering how people live, work, and play. With a wide catalog of products, Verizon offers a variety of services to cover all aspects user’s family’s needs. The downfall of having such a big catalog is having so many applications to manage all potential family needs. We were tasked with bringing together those apps and creating one application that provided families a singular management point. Along with consolidating, we also went through a company wide rebranding, and wanted to improve on the onboarding and integration into the new Verizon Family open ecosystem.
Making family safety and organization easy
The users of Verizon Family includes quite a variety of roles and expectations, however the primary target audience are caregivers. This includes caregivers for young children, multiple children, teenagers, and the elderly. Users want to protect their dependents through various safety topics such as physical, mental, and online safety.
The current barrier for achieving a safer family dynamic is that the management capabilities are spread across so many different existing apps. There are different accounts required for each app and each app requires a different download on the dependents device, causing confusion and excessive applications on devices.
My role in the project
As the Lead Product Designer, I collaborated with our experience managers, feature owner, and front-end developers to enhance and iterate on possible solutions for the improvement of the profile and family onboarding.
We each had specific responsibilities; my job was to work on rebranding the existing screens and provide small level of effort improvements for the first roll out phase, while gathering larger wins for the upcoming phases.
The mandate: update existing flows to the new brand and enhance onboarding to new open ecosystem
Our feature owners were feeling rather overwhelmed with the task of creating on open ecosystem for families to interact in; where new user types and roles where being introduced and also updating the existing brand. The biggest change was trying to create a singular onboarding experience that would familiarize users with the new UI and ecosystem, while balancing a reasonable length as to not provide too much cognitive load on their first introduction.
We started by understanding what content was required to be contained for all the new status’s we would be providing by bringing together the apps, and then worked on finding a logical way to progress through the onboarding. Once we had a solid set of improvements together, I created user flows that we started to socialize and came across some hurdles from other cross functional teams where we could not change some of the Verizon brands process. This allowed us to iterate our design until we could accommodate the larger brands needs while also keeping our target audience in mind.
Once the product and design teams aligned on the onboarding flow from the shared user flows, I integrated the new brand design system into the new end to end specification flow file. This was then used as a collaboration tool to discuss technical feasibility with our development team members to ask any questions and to aid in sprint planning for implementation.
As the development team began to get stable code, nearing the apps launch, I began to complete visual testing to make sure that the code matched the designs that were handed off. If I came across discrepancies in the designs, I began documenting the defects in Jira for the development team to log and address.
After some discussions on technical feasibility which lead to design iterations, we were able to cross-functionally agree on the design improvements and the phases to roll out the updates. I was able to hand over all final product screens in the end to end flow file, as well as provide some design system wide components to help with quicker integration of the brand updates for our team.
