Specs

Timeline: 2 months

Deliverable: high-fidelity clickable prototype

Skills: design thinking, UX design, UI design, storytelling

Tools: Miro, Sketch

Brief

Communication Service Providers (CSPs) - major telecom players like AT&T and Verizon - have gotten really good at providing network connectivity, but in order to stay relevant in the market, they need to transform to Digital Services Providers (DSPs) that have offerings beyond connectivity.

How might we elevate the image of CSPs in the eyes of enterprise customers by empowering CSPs to provide additional services aside from network connectivity?

Dash Agora is a marketplace for DSPs to offer enterprises additional services, from their own offerings to partner offerings. With Dash Agora, our DSPs can provide enterprises with an end-to-end service design toolkit with the ability to create agile, holistic offerings that can be easily packaged and bundled to end-consumers

Process

As the sole designer on this project, I interfaced on a daily basis with Product Lifecycle Managers and subject matter experts (SMEs) from the Nokia Global Business Center. Following the traditional five-step design thinking process, I lead the team through the empathize phase. Several of the PLMs and SMEs had never heard of design thinking before, let alone practiced it. We used Miro to complete a number of activities like a stakeholder map, questions and assumptions, and journey maps to get us started. This allowed us all to get on the same page and get the ball rolling with our creative process.

We developed two personas, Dawn and Emilia, and explored their empathy maps and as-is scenarios.

Dawn is the VP of Marketing of a “daring DSP” who wants to expand her company’s offerings beyond network connectivity. Emilia is the property manager of an “eager enterprise” who wants take her business park to the next level.

Moving into the define phase, we further developed and visualized our personas.

Next, we completed a user needs statement activity to better define Emilia’s and Dawn’s problem statements.

Dawn’s key user need is to expand Dash from a Communications Service Provider (CSP) to a Digital Services Provider (DSP) to avoid her company turning into simply a connectivity pipeline, while Emilia needs to level up her business park to keep up with competitor properties and keep her tenants safe during COVID-19.

To kick off the ideate phase, I lead the team through a Crazy 8s activity. It was fun and rewarding to get technical sales people to draw! Here are some favorite sketches from the team. We used dot voting to converge on a few solid ideas, all surrounding a digital marketplace.

After completing another questions and assumptions activity to hammer out the details of our solution, I sketched a to-be scenario that combined the journeys of Dawn and Emilia.

After that, it was time to get prototyping. I started in low-fidelity with some digital sketches, then moved to mid-fidelity in Sketch.

The final prototype was a high-fidelity, clickable mockup designed in Sketch. The journey first follows Emilia in the DSP portal as she selects services and checks out from the marketplace, then through her own dashboard as she manages her services.