Virgin Media

Improve Billing

There was a clear plan from the company perspective. Virgin Media wanted to empower its users to solve any issue's themselves. With that in mind, we wanted to make journeys as easy as possible to understand.

We never wanted users to struggle to find the information they needed. They also always wanted to be proactive in communication with the end-user.

Bill Overview

The bill overview was the main landing section of the billing area, and as such, it was the first section I wanted to tackle. I wanted to utilise the working patterns of the already released sections of the experience. The last thing a user wants to do is to have to relearn the patterns of a website midway through.

I introduced an easier way for the end-user to navigate throughout the months of their contract, as well as giving them the ability to compare the cost of this month to previous ones. The only way to do this on the existing website was to download each bill individually, so we made this an easy to see design element, which could then be expanded upon in the future, by incorporating additional spending

The work had huge success within this project, showing that 9/10 users could solve the problem using the information we presented to them. The data for this result came from a containment rate of 89.5% of users clicking that they needed no additional help in the on-screen dialogue presented to them after their journey.

Bill Explainer

With a big change in the way the billing area looked and functioned, I pitched the idea of a walkthrough guide for both new customers and people who were being brought through into the new version of billing.
I was inspired by the onboarding style of phone applications, which allow a user to learn about new sections of the UI as and when they needed them. We had some difficulties with being able to explain certain features as the user may not have interacted with their bill in a particular way, and I didn’t want a new area to pop up in the future without an explanation, whilst also not wanting to force a new onboarding the next time a customer opened the web page.

In the end, I decided on using real billing data but showing all the possible fields a user may face. This allowed them to see every area they might interact with in the future, which could also be hidden when they finished the onboarding session.
I took the prototype through a few iterations of user testing, focusing on what a customer would expect to be shown, as well as incorporating as much data tracking from the existing website.

This in turn ensured that the most clicked items were shown to a user so they knew where to find them in future.

Notifications

Notifications gave us the opportunity to give warning of events to the users when they arrive on pages

I wanted to ensure that users were aware of changes to their bills, as well as reassure them when they had actioned something on the website concerning approach billing. I decided to use the notification pattern that was in use in other areas of the project. By introducing a level system of notifications. We could create easy to dismiss notifications when no user action is required up to emergency customer interaction is needed events. Long term these could also be used to make users aware of future billing events. An example is a higher than expected bill due to On Demand content being purchased previously. By solving the problem of unexpectedly high costs we make the user feel more in control of their billing.

Anonymous Journeys

Existing data showed that the number of users navigating to the billing area from outside the virgin media website was skewed dramatically towards not being logged in. We wanted to ensure that the high number of users in a logged-out state could still try to solve their problem, before being pushed to log in. With that in mind, I reimagined the journeys for anonymous users. These designs were just about to be launched as I joined the project so I made them a focus in the first few weeks.

I reduced the number of clicks a user would need to act before coming to their selected page by improving the flows to a more logical paginated state, at the same time reducing some of the videos and additional media which was slowing the web page down and which data showed was not been interacted with in any way.

Allow Users To Pay Their Bills

Alongside giving users a pay to see and interact with their bill, A goal of the project was to allow users to also pay their bill or any fines they may have incurred in their account. To do this we explored various aspects of not just the actual bills, but how could we ensure that the customer knew any upcoming payments which were due to be paid in the near future.

Quick Pay

Being able to pay the bull was one of the most important aspects of the whole project, but users were constantly frustrated with the existing usability of paying their bill.

I simplified the page, enabling the user to save their most common cards, to bring it in line with industry standards.

Anonymous Payments

By utalizing the end users secure access, we created the ability for a user to pay their bill without being logged into their account. Through user testing we noticed this feautre was commonly requested, Most notably in two use cases. One was users with elderly relatives that they took the responsibility for, and also parents who had children in university.

This got brought into a short sprint of work as it was seen as not much work for an instant improvement to the experience.

Partial Payments

For a subset of users, paying their bills is not financially achievable.

These more vulnerable customers were given the ability to make a partial payment, allowing them to pay a percentage of their bill with the rest of the bill being added onto a future payment.

I explored different variations of micro-interactions to enhance the feature. By leading the eye with animation it ensures that the user is able

Improving Logged In Abilities

Virgin Media had a problem that was affecting the ability to interact with customers in a way which allowed them to solve customers' problems. It was noted on the user analytics that many people were not logged into the service when using the Help sites.

We had data which showed that customers were unwilling to log in due to the conflicting nature of the user data Virgin had, the Virgin Mobile information was different to Virgin Media which was different again to Virgin Money or Virgin Trains.

This information was not shared between the different businesses so customers had frustrationns with forgotten passwords and user names.

Logging In

With the first releases of the Virgin Care updates, there was no way for a user to log in. This was causing issues for the initial subset of users who were taken through the new pages.

There was work going on in the background to release a Log In phase, but it not being available caused major issue’s for the Billing team as we had to force the user through the older experience to log in before redirecting them back to the new design, a frustrating incohesive and incomplete experience.

I created a short-term approach as a stop gap to solve the problem for my team, ensuring that users could continue their journeys without needing to rely on external sites while maintaining Virgin Media’s strict security protocols. This quick feature improved monthly user’s completing a Log In journey by 35.8% compared to the existing live site. A huge improvement for the team

One Time Password

The usage stats of the project showed that existing customers were only logging into the site less than 20% of the time.

Feedback from users showed that there was a variety of problems with the login journey, but due to security reasons, these wouldn’t be fixed in a reasonable time.

Our data team reported that the main issue that users noted was forgetting their username and/or password with 9/10 customers saying they would rather just exit the site rather than trying to reset the password.

With this in mind, I was given a short spike to investigate an alternative way for users to log in. After numerous ideation sessions with the wider agile team, I settled on the use of a One Time Password entry.

This allowed a user to receive a code via SMS or Email, they could use that code to log into their account. In line with Virgin Media security protocols, this was also restricted to being on their local WiFi network associated with the account to protect private information.

The first iteration of this feature was only used to allow someone to pay their bill as a proof of concept on both the design and technical side and was met by unanimous approval in customer feedback sessions