Telecommunication Product Illustration System
Harnessing visual design and digital illustration to convey an enhanced customer onboarding experience for a new wireless home internet product
Overview
The Company
As the largest telecommunications company in the world, more than 120 million customers count on our client every day to deliver the wireless, internet, data, and advertising services that fuel their businesses and connect them to their world.
The Objective
The client launched a new wireless home internet product and service in late 2022, and they asked frog to develop an omnichannel strategy and blueprint for the onboarding experience of the service.
The Program
Client stakeholders tasked us with establishing a strategic framework for wireless broadband (WBB). They sought a robust strategy for the new customer experience that would not only meet their current needs but also possess the adaptability and strength to be implemented across other business ventures in the future.
My Role
As the Visual Designer, I created a branded, scalable illustration system to show how to bring the customer and agent experience to life. I also actively contributed to Experience Strategy and Opportunity Spaces developed to socialize the new program internally across the company.
New technology that brings connectivity to all
The company’s introduction to wireless broadband is a wireless broadband gateway or provides wireless backup for wireline networks, presenting a unique opportunity to connect rural customers.
Recognizing the critical importance of a positive onboarding experience for new customers, the client engaged frog to develop an Experience Strategy that ensures a delightful onboarding process.
Deliverables
To complement this strategy, a comprehensive Service Blueprint was created, meticulously outlining all the backend processes essential to powering the envisioned customer experience. Lastly, the client sought vibrant Concept Illustrations from frog to shed light on potential transformative opportunities for key customer Moments that Matter.
Experience Strategy
Provides an overarching narrative as a north star to ensure support of overall goals for the organization and the offering Increase our chances of our agents winning the contract, and bolstering agents’ trust in our referrals through a high-quality, consistent experience
Opportunity Illustrations
Show how to bring the customer and agent experience to life as a persuasive tool to gain alignment across internal domains.
Service Blueprint
Details how the target experience is delivered through every channel, touchpoint and actor over time, realizing the promise of experience strategy and opportunity illustrations
Making inclusive design the new normal
The frog team pushed the client to research and design the onboarding experience catering to people’s varied abilities. The client was so receptive to the opportunity that we ended up pitching accessibility as a holistic project (beyond this product) to C-level stakeholders within the company.
Visually bringing opportunities to life across programs
We designed an easily scalable illustration system that is highly replicable for internal documentation and socialization for the new product’s services. As the Visual Designer for the Onboard & Activate program, I teamed up with the frog Visual Designer assigned the concurrent Service & Support program to design a cohesive style. Together, we developed a branded world of objects, environments, and characters for use across the client’s internal design teams.
Brand Alignment
Tired of stock illustration systems, the client asked us to create imagery that embodies their friendly yet innovative spirit, and supports the key aspects of the product experience.
Expressive: Empathetic, inclusive, forward-thinking, energetic, dynamic
Familiar: Emotive, relatable, contextual,
Tangible / Reliable: Humanizing agents - Trust. Making the service visible - giving the service a face & placing these entities into context
Art Direction
Tone: Organic | Vibrant | Emotive
Principles
Scalable (Modular)
Each character can be adjusted for different contexts by replacing pieces and parts from the character’s closet, and by placing the figure within different environments. We’re making these initial illustration assets as deliverables for our current programs, but we want this library to live on to inspire an illustration system for future programs with the client.
Narrative
We’re employing Archetypes to humanize the different segments of the client’s customers. Figural, expressive characters facilitate empathy and will empower users to act with a human-centered mindset. Since the Archetype Identities are static, they can act as shorthand for a specific user type’s mental maps, needs, pain points, expectations, and overall journeys across episodes.
Cohesive
Archetypes are assigned an identity that is consistent across all assets (ie. Agent Em is still Agent Em across the multiple frog programs, in the Strat Deck and the Blueprint). The same colors, line weight, and hand are consistent wherever the character appears, and when new items are created. Archetypes are a narrative lynchpin between episodes, use cases, workstreams, and audiences. This decreases cognitive load for users when they can recognize and have a frame of reference for an archetype’s characteristics and needs.
Developing an illustration style
We also explored the benefits and drawbacks to a spectrum of style inspirations, to ensure our illustrations hit the emotional mark but were easy for future artists to execute. This way, the system could grow across products and with the client’s future endeavors.
Spectrum of potential styles
I aligned with the Visual Designer on a parallel frog program for the same client, and we found a nice balance of style attributes. I began sketching characters and scenes to get a quick sense of which pieces we needed to build. Then I iterated digital sketches until we landed on a polished style.
A life of their own
The client fully adopted our illustration system, utilizing it across further experience design and strategy documentation.
