Bionic - Hey Cristian

Bionic (previously named Make it Cheaper) is a B2B price comparison company who has, for the past 10 years, offered its services exclusively over the phone. As part of their new strategy, they assembled a product team to build out their digital capabilities and I took ownership of UX for their most important product: business energy.

Cristian is one of the most talented UX designers I've had the opportunity to work with. He combines the rare trait of having a highly considered, user-focused approach with a tremendous work rate and keen eye for achieving the right outcomes for the business.

At Bionic he led the design effort on our core digital journey, and was key in delivering a product that delighted users with its ease and clarity, and outperformed business expectations. I'd happily recommend him to any company that cares about their user experience, and would personally welcome the opportunity to work with him again in future.

Nick Falkowski

Head of Product @ MIC

The Project

The goals of the project are outlined below, and my responsibilities included facilitating exploration and discovery via research, conceptualising and prototyping, working to understand our target audience and helping the rest of the team make the best of this information, as well as acting as the 'voice of the user', producing high-quality experiences and designs, and assisting with development and implementation.

Capture previously inaccessible segments of the market.

According to a market research report the company commissioned, the market is split into four categories, from people who engage frequently with price comparison sites and switch often, to people who are not even aware we exist. The first category is best served by a mix of online tools and phone conversations, so our proposition is as appealing as it could be to them, while the second and third categories, who engage far less frequently, have concerns and reservations that no competitor is fully addressing at this time.

Identify ways to utilise the strengths of the voice journey and to leverage the sales agents online.

The conversion rate of our sales agents, honed over many years, could not be rivalled by any online tool, so we realised the importance of a. translating the best bits of the voice journey wherever possible and b. giving users the opportunity to connect with our agents in smart ways.

Build an MVP by and later on deliver a best in class online journey.

Our plan was to launch an MVP first and aim to not cannibalise phone sales, and then evolve that into a fully polished online journey over the coming months.

Meet partner expectations.

Bionic provides the B2B comparison services of major sites such as USwitch, MoneySupermarket and Confused, all of which want us to develop an online journey.

Preparations

In order to achieve those goals, we ran a design sprint in the Google Ventures format and we invited people from across the company to make sure all the relevant points of view are represented. In preparation for the sprint, I did competitor UX research, prepared personas, listened in on calls our agents were doing to understand more about the voice journey and interviewed various team leaders. Before getting started we also agreed on the goals of the project and what the questions we're trying to answer are, so that everyone is aiming for the same target.

The Design Sprint

Once we finished unpacking the information we had, we started sketching and discussing ideas (we used Crazy 8s in this case) and voted on the ones we thought would perform best.

Ideas

We ended up with two competing ideas to test and it was now my responsibility to produce the wireframes needed to help the team visualise the concepts and facilitate further exploration.

The first idea took a more conventional approach where we used a form to gather the details we needed from users then present their results and help them switch.

The second idea was a more radical approach where we would show all the results first and ask users to fill out their information one field at a time, which would narrow down and update the results.

In order to help everyone on the team visualise the journeys we discussed I created several journey maps.

User Testing

In order to test these ideas, I created two rudimentary coded prototypes, to give users a more accurate representation of what using them would be like and avoid problems we had with tools like InVision on past projects.

We ran online surveys via UserZoom (who could recruit 100 relevant participants for us) and also did a full day session of moderated in-person interviews, where participants went through each idea and talked aloud about their thoughts and concerns. At the end, they were asked to rate on a scale of 1-10 how likely they are to use our services and what influenced their rating.

Try the prototypes

Lessons Learned

While the response to the proposition was positive, we did learn a few important lessons.

First, participants clearly favoured the first idea and were vocal about the problems they saw: they felt it was gimmicky and confusing.

Secondly, both ideas would use several APIs to retrieve data on behalf of customers, however the first approach demonstrated this in a visual way (once a user agrees, the fields fill up and get clearly labelled as 'Filled with Industry Data'), whereas the second only described what data we're retrieving. This told us users would need the visual aid to understand and be comfortable with the data we are retrieving.

Lastly, we realised we didn't do a very good job of highlighting the benefits of our services compared to switching directly through providers.

The Design

We used these lessons and a few more exploration sessions to come up with a first design for the final product, which you can see below. One of the challenges I faced when designing this was ensuring accessibility standards are met (we decided on AA) while still adhering to brand guidelines that were not created with accessibility in mind.

The design system also had to be easy to white-label so that our partners could integrate it into their sites easily.

Results

I continued to monitor the performance of the journey to understand drop off points and explore further improvements. Analytics revealed an increase in conversion from 1% to 9% and the experience has been well recveived by customers.

Next Project

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