t-mobile
Now Reintroducing!
The initial release of T-mobile’s addicting customer appreciation app.
brief.
T-Mobile had a dream, an ambitious one—at least for 2014.
I will admit, this one is an oldie, but it's a goodie. I was the principal UX designer for the OG T-Mobile Tuesday's app!
I know right? At that time, it was a pretty complex promotional app. It was so successful, it's actually still around today... albeit several iterations later.
TYPE OF WORK
UX Design, UI Design
TITLE
Lead UX / UI Designer, Producer
TOOLS USED
Figma, Axure, Google Sheets, Google Slides
why.
Attention is currency, and mobile carriers tend only get attention when they mess up. T-Mobile wanted to create a customer appreciation app that would show some real love, and keep their customers coming back week after week.
Why Tuesday? Well, it's sort of a crappy day anyway, so we wanted to add some enjoyment with the possibility of prizes.
research.
It's story time.
It's the height of 2014 and the secretive project is in its infancy. There are blackout (well pink-out) films on the war room windows. Coworkers walking by are sneaking peeks through the crack in the door as a super-special team of hipster marketers work late into the night on a big new project.
Smartphones are completely saturating the world wreaking havoc on people's ability to pay attention to anything for longer than 10 minutes (it was still 10 minutes then). Geolocation is the hot new feature as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and GPS enabled apps are making their way into the main stream. Foursquare elected me mayor of the Caribou Coffee next to the office.
We knew we had some challenges. Not only are promotional marketing campaigns easily ignored--often they either lack authenticity, don't provide real value, or they just blow up your inbox until you finally reply "STAHP"--but we had to find a fresh take on familiar and create an engaging app that people would actually want to spend their valuable 10 minutes of attention with.
Next, we had to figure out how we were going to make the whole thing happen.
challenge.
If you like integrated system and user flows, you would love to have worked on this project at its inception. T-Mobile Tuesdays was quite the beast from a systemic point of view. We wanted to bring in local level promotional partners along with national brands. Create space for community style content and foster small artists.
All of this needed to be sourced and fed to T-Mobile customers in an intuitive application that made people want to open it back up every Tuesday. We had to handle partner prize redemption in multiple formats and allow for prize receipt affidavits. At the start, you could even with T-Mobile stock. I mean, it was pretty complicated for the time.
The premise would be simple enough:
If you're a T-Mobile customer, put in your phone number to register, open the app every Tuesday, play a new minigame and see what you won. If you didn't win that week, you could browse the list of "evergreen" offers in the app and try your luck next week.
As we had quite a lot of content of differing types and several promotional partners, my focus was to make it easy for people to keep track of a few things:
When is the next game available?
What prizes am I playing for?
What offers do I have?
What have I already won and what have I redeemed?
from flows to frames.
Once we were pretty set on how the flows flowed, it was time to start thinking about layout, interaction cues and transitions. It's wireframe time baby! Heavily annotated wireframes at that. And there were a lot of them. Here's a quick scroll through about 10 percent of them.
looking pretty in t-mobile pink
And finally! We get to open up our box of crayons! I worked closely with the creative team to ensure we were sticking to the core UX principles I had set out while keeping the brand voice tightly tuned in.
The results.
Well, honestly, I don't work for The Marketing Store anymore. That means I don't have access to all the fun statistics at this point. I do know the app was wildly successful, especially for a promotional app. In fact, it's on version 7 at this point with a 4.8 star rating with 375,000 reviews and is #8 of the Lifestyle app list on the Apple App Store.