Verizon is America's largest wireless provider and has helped create a world where every service imaginable is available on demand. In the connected age, everything is instant. It’s an expectation that’s left traditional customer service models behind. Intelligent and easy to use, we designed the My Verizon app to meet the needs of 110 million subscribers, providing complete self-service through its intuitive, instantaneous design and conversational interface. Featuring a simplified bill, personalized control center, on-demand support and shopping functionality, the app has achieved record-breaking sales, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.
In 2015, the My Verizon program had been underway for 11 months. In November, I received a phone call: "We're looking for a fixer. I hear you're one of the best product people in the city. And I hear you're a wrangler. We have a lot of wrangling to do here. Could we meet with you?"
My reputation precedes me. It's true. I am a wrangler. What most people don't know is that you have to have an incredible innate sense for how to cut through all the fog to find the lighthouse and shape an entire program around extreme clarity. Once you find this clarity, the structure follows, and there isn't as much "wrangling" needed as you may have thought at the outset. The secret of any successful program really does lie in master planning.
In the very first week of the program, I spoke to several individuals — from executives on high, to middle managers, to those buried in the trenches. I conduct these sessions always with the intent of gleaning both overall vision and requirements. The key is to hold both the high-level and the low-level in your mind at the same time. I have a savant-like ability (think Dustin Hoffman's character from Rain Man) to process large amounts of disparate information and begin organizing into categories on a blank canvas. I'm not afraid of blank canvas. And it's actually the best place to start, even on programs that are mid-flight. You have to step back, look at the big picture, and start bucketing things into digestible, logical chunks.
I wrote 600 user stories in six days. I kept the spreadsheet extremely simple: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3. The first two levels serve to bucket the user stories into logical chunks. The third level is the actual user story itself, written in plain language, short and sweet, no longer than a tweet. I then took these logical chunks and created a big-ass poster, at 3 feet high and 12 feet long. The x-axis is time, represented at the day level, spanning one year. I believe in representing time in days, because it's both meaningful and representative of reality — every day counts. Along the y-axis, I laid out the various workstreams that would run concurrently, each comprised of a mix of disciplines that were complementary and complete.
Every project — regardless of scale or importance — is subject to the classic triangle of (1) time, (2) money, (3) quality. And as is the case with every project, you begin with an incredible sense of hopefulness that you'll be able to fulfill on all three in the best way possible. Often, only two parts of the triangle can be achieved, one part has to be sacrificed.
I think it's possible to make the right thing happen, but only if you have healthiness and good intent at the leadership level, and if you assemble a cross-disciplinary team with the right skills present from day one. No one wants to join a project late. And often times, many disciplines are an afterthought and get called in too late. Copywriters, visual designers, QA engineers — they are often phased in later. I find this practice abhorrent.
You'll actually save more time, save more money, and ensure better quality if you engage all of the various disciplines from day one of a project. Strategy isn't just for strategists. That's an incredibly elitist way of thinking about how to run a project. If you let all of the various disciplines participate from day one, you'll be both surprised and delighted at what you might find from each unique perspective.
There is nothing more maddening than old-school, corporate ways of working. It's the one thing that I cannot bear on a program. The level of waste that occurs is astounding. And at the end of it, you have nothing to show for it. You blame the poor outcomes on bad process, bad people, bad direction. If you were to look at root cause, you'll find that much of the poor outcomes can be traced back to old-school ways of working. If you can fix that one thing from the very start, you can dramatically change the outcomes for a program.
By way of circumstance, I figured out a way of working that I now swear by. I won't run a program in any other way. The principles are grounded in basic truths, and they are extremely pragmatic. Most importantly, it places the person at the center of it all and takes into account the basic human psychology of "working" that many companies and leaders simply forget or willfully ignore.
At it's core, we had a few key tenets: (1) the leads will meet with each workstream for 30 minutes every morning to see the work, provide guidance, and course correct; (2) everyone on the program from every single discipline will meet once a week on Thursday morning at the Verizon office to share the actual work being done; (3) everyone on the program from every single discipline will meet on Thursday afternoons for four hours to power through all of the tough stuff together and plan out what we'll be doing for the next four days; (4) there are zero meetings outside of this; (5) there is zero redlining of documents and throwing them over the fence at each other; (6) there is zero tolerance for bullshit behavior from anyone on the program, regardless of their rank or tenure.
In September 2019, I did a stage talk at the Awwwards Conference that explains all of this. I also published an article that explains all of this in great detail — you need the nitty gritty and full color for it to all make sense. Read my complete writeup on Medium.
When we feel good about the overall master plan and have a solid first pass at the overall set of requirements, then information architecture (IA) is a fast follow. I started my career in the design and tech space in August 2000 as a technical writer for mainframe systems. Ever wonder who wrote those 600-page mainframe manuals? Yeah, that was me.
As a technical writer, you have to have an innate ability for organizing information. It is inherent to the craft. You start with the macro view of all of the information that needs to be organized into a large published volume, and then you start breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces, until you arrive at the "atomic unit".
For the My Verizon app, the information architecture had been in dispute for quite some time (years, in fact!). For the 11 months that the overhaul had been underway — with very little to show for it — many of the issues and chaos ensued from a lack of robust requirements that were well-documented and very easy to follow, as well as a flawed information architecture that was neither intuitive nor complete.
I always use 3.5" x 5" unruled blank white index cards. I carry a pack of one hundred with me in my bag at all times. I even have a mini set of five in my wallet. Index cards are a simple, inexpensive, and environmentally conscious way to organize a bunch of stuff. The "stuff" can really be anything. For the My Verizon app, getting the bones of it figured out began with a deck of 100 blank index cards.
After mapping things out into logical categories and sliding them around on the conference table, we were ready to pin things up on the felted wallboard. The overall structure of the app began to take shape. By going analog first, you can quickly try things out and move stuff around. It feels less precious when you toss out something you wrote on a little card. And it's also so much easier to do little hand sketches of ideas, as they come to mind, or print out inspirational pieces and cut them out and place alongside various areas of the application.
We then move to Keynote and Sketch to begin digitally mapping out the overall architecture for the application. I like to quickly gut check along the way with people from various disciplines, as well as friends and family. It helps make all of us feel more confident about what we're making. These are the bones of what will soon be a massive application that needs to withstand the test of time.
There are new device dimensions to account for every year. For the My Verizon app (which was natively built for both iPhone and Android), we knew 110,000,000 customers would potentially be looking at it on a tiny iPhone 8 and a ginormous iPhone 12. And we knew this would be the case back in 2016, when we were trying to future-proof the overall design system, as much as possible for 2020 and beyond.
Brad Frost formalized atomic design in late 2016, when he published his book Atomic Design. All good design is based in these principles. The design system we created for the My Verizon app was no different. We took painstaking care to come up with a grid system that would be flexible across different screen sizes. We worked through numerous typography iterations to come up with a hierarchy that would work beautifully on big phones and small phones. We labored over the image standards and graphic composition for every informational module.
Neue Haas Grotesk is a beautiful, timeless typeface that feels iconically Verizon. Any ad campaign is immediately recognizable with the bold use of typography (go big or go home!) and the strong contrast of the brand's signature red, black, and white. While the original design system in 2016 relied heavily on headlines written in bold red, supported by graphics comprised of four pastels (salmon, pale yellow, mint green, and baby blue), we caught wind of the new design system being worked on by Pentagram. The move to a much more bold, stark, utilitarian look and feel — completely void of any secondary pastels (thank goodness!) — had us excited for the future.
We also knew that the design system we had come up with had good bones. It would withstand the test of time and a new set of guidelines that were in stark contrast to what we were working with in the early part of 2016. The painstaking detail in which we had planned and future-proofed paid off in a seminal way the following year.
Measurement is important at a lot of companies. But I must say, Verizon takes measurement very, very seriously. I am thankful to have worked with such a rigorous team of data scientists, analysts, strategists, and business leaders to figure out early on the metrics that matter.
You have to tag everything you think you might want to learn about. We were relentless in making sure tagging was done correctly for every element, every page, every entry point, every exit point, every scroll. I'm especially fanatical about how things are named. Why abbreviate when you can spell things out? Why be opaque when you can be transparent? Why doodle and dawdle when a bit of master planning will result in a work of art?
Our hard work paid off. And we took an iterative approach to making this happen. The Adobe Analytics suite was a joy to use and learn from because we did the work early and we checked in often.
Within seven months of the app’s launch, Verizon’s mobile sales conversion rate rose 15.6x, and overall usage is up over 50%. Bill payment within the app increased from 68% to 85% and is buoyed by a 27% lift in autopay enrollment. The app gives the network’s 113 million customers more control, with less work, all in the palm of their hand.
We could have framed the words of Diego Scotti, the enterprise CMO for Verizon in 2016. This was one hell of a program and one hell of a launch party. Almost no one on the program had undertaken an effort of this kind before. We kicked off the program in earnest on January 4, 2016. We had over 3,000 screens and states when we launched on July 7, 2016.
It was important to me that the team had a happy and healthy work environment through all of this. Burnout is typical for programs of this nature. By establishing a Thursday-only day for everyone to come together, I was able to give everyone heads-down time on the other four days of the week. Designers, writers, and engineers need time and brainspace to do their work. Random meetings, mid-day disruptions, arbitrary corporate rules — I shun old-school ways of working.
When you are in a position of power, it's a moral imperative to create the kind of environment a team can thrive in. You have to be the champion of change you want to see. And you have to have the courage to carry out this change, every day.
"Munawar is an incredible colleague, mentor, leader, and educator. She’s been a huge asset to our project and in creating a close collaboration across Data and UX. She has been an exceptional mentor to me over the past few months, pushing me to step out of my comfort zone, teaching me about UX and the importance of UX and Data working in tandem. She is so knowledgeable in her field and her passion for her field is contagious to people on her team and across the agency. Munawar is a skilled leader and visionary and definitely taken our work to the next level."
Annie Corbett, Data Analyst at AKQA in 2016
Ekin Seker McLean, Creative Director at AKQA
