Challenge

Reignite customers’ passion for Nokia

For several years, Nokia had been the recognised leader in mobile phones. However, their dominance was beginning to crumble. They were facing competition from Samsung on low-end devices, Blackberry in the business sector and of course Apple on high-end devices.

In addition, their main tool to promote their products, the Nokia website, was hopelessly out of date and did nothing to improve customers’ perception of the brand. A redesign that Nokia had spent 18 months on wasn’t going to change this either. I was part of a team that convinced Nokia there was a better approach - to reignite customers’ passion for Nokia by “hero-ing” the best of what Nokia had to offer.

I led the UX strategy and design to deliver a completely new website redesign for over 120 markets worldwide.

Partially as a result of its large product portfolio, Nokia’s legacy website consisted of several layers of confusing navigation. Armed with customer insights, I conducted a workshop with stakeholders to establish the key user journeys that would form the basis of the new user experience.

We arrived at an experience that would focus on three basic user needs: “I want a phone”, “I have a phone” and “I need support for my phone”. The simplicity of this approach allowed stakeholders, design and technology teams to all easily focus on creating the solution. This approach was also broad enough to include strategic priorities for Nokia at the time, such as promoting their app and music store (Ovi) and their mapping product.

In being awarded the project, Nokia halted a redesign project that had already been in progress for 18 months. To achieve against tight delivery timelines, we had to design and deliver at pace, which meant moving the London-based UX/UI design team to Finland. Co-locating the design teams with the engineering teams ensured they could work quickly and efficiently together and also created a sense of pride and shared ownership in the final deliverable.

Still working from London, I maintained remote oversight of the team. We worked iteratively with concepting and sketches of key pages/modules originating from London and then being realised as wireframes by the UX team in Helsinki. From the wireframes, robust Axure prototypes defined the detailed interactions and were an essential tool to get engineering teams working while the overall design system and UI designs were defined and delivered.

I oversaw several rounds of user research in multiple countries to ensure the new experience design was one that would resonate with customers. Research was performed using wireframe prototypes as well as functional prototypes with final designs. Eyetracking was utilised to provide the best evaluation of the visual hierarchies in the new design.