MLS being a Greek company, had to deal with a variety of challenges in her effort
to stay financially sustainable and competitive in a really demanding area with limited resources, such as the Balkans.
Initially, I was given a common presenting problem from the Head Engineer:
“Phone experience currently looks tacky and we are asked to redesign it”

I took the following 3 major steps:

1. Started raising awareness during all meetings
   Sensitizing a company that never had a UX designer in the past was a challenge. The leadership would take part in the decision making, being vocal from the design of the product to the launch. Thus I had to develop a clear strategy, picking battles and standing firm on how we were to deal with user’s requirements.
2. Moved my desk from the Creative room, to the Engineers Floor.
   Being next to those who were developing the phone was important. The dynamics between the Creative team and Engineers weren’t (as usually is the case) as smooth as they could. As a result, shaping a different culture that was empathetic to the user’s needs, demanded lots of changes and tweaks, presenting the need for a better and stronger connection between me and the Developers.
3. Started including like-minded, user-centered stakeholders in shaping the next phone
   Due to the lack of clear leadership on Customer Service, I had to initiate weekly catchups with the Telephone Customer Service, Shop representatives, and the Front desk technical support. That way I started receiving a list of pain points and issues that were not known earlier to the Marketing and Creative team.

Going through the phone’s interface, I felt often overwhelmed about where I should start. Visuals were problematic and journeys confusing to any age, not just for seniors. Being urged from the leadership for fast results on the visual sector, I found it best to start making small signs of progress in both the usability and the desirability of the product, separating my day between interviewing customer service support & revisiting visuals, trying small changes that will make users feel this is still their product but visually more appealing.

A major feature of the phone that was overpublicized was the voice activation, that enabled seniors to call contacts without the use of a touchscreen. Great insight was comparing analytics from Firebase and from qualitative research with user interviews.

Most of the users were positive initially, saying how happy they were to have that feature. When we started going deeper in the one on one interviews, it became apparent that most of them were avoiding it, and many times being afraid of it. This is where we realized that many users would pretend they love the product to keep us happy 😛 or to show they are technically savvy.
Our data was pretty clear though:
a) Out of the voice call activations, there was a 30% failure
b) There were long screen times on most of the menus after the unlocking of the phone.
(Our assumption was that it wasn’t clear to them what they should be doing)

The same time, there was a large number of phones being delivered to customer services and a huge amount of calls received daily, concerning simple steps that were mistaken & misunderstood. As a result, the lack of simple easy journeys was generating a big financial cost in the area of Technicians, n-Shop Customer service, and Helpline Support.

Journeys like dealing with contacts could end up being a nightmare for the seniors. E.g, there were really small screens that would show the profile of each contact, adding or editing an entry could end up easily on deleting it, while there were 3 steps in order to save a contact.

I redesigned the menus, made profile pictures larger, and when chosen almost fullscreen.
Removed useless steps and finally took the delete option further from the other actions.

A rough prototype can be found here.

Dealing with the Voice Calling, I found entertaining the quote of one of the seniors I was interviewing. When the Voice Call button would be tapped, due to his fear of doing a mistake or the app mishearing the name, he literally said with wide eyes: “I just open a drawer and immediately throw it in there”.

Despite the entertaining value of this, we realized that there was a pace of absorbing & dealing with information we had to deal with that was not compatible with the way we were all designing other apps and features for the mainstream phones of the company. As a result, different helpful ways had to be introduced, such as:

1) Smooth sounds and voice, explaining what is happening
2) Informative screens before any major action were initiated (call would be initiated in 5 seconds etc.)
3) Low pace of screens changing (screens would stay longer and fade out smoothly)

Dealing with the Voice Calling, I found entertaining the quote of one of the seniors I was interviewing. When the Voice Call button would be tapped, due to his fear of doing a mistake or the app mishearing the name, he literally said with wide eyes: “I just open a drawer and immediately throw it in there”.

Despite the entertaining value of this, we realized that there was a pace of absorbing & dealing with information we had to deal with that was not compatible with the way we were all designing other apps and features for the mainstream phones of the company. As a result, different helpful ways had to be introduced, such as:

1) Smooth sounds and voice, explaining what is happening
2) Informative screens before major actions were initiated (call would be initiated in 5 seconds etc.)
3) Low pace of screens changing (screens would stay longer and fade out smoothly.

With a large number of users starting to be negative about the product, I felt such a soothing feeling when we all agreed on the last step, which was really crucial:
All changes would be pushed/updated automatically to all feature phones, letting users know that their experience has been simplified.

It took only a few days and we started receiving really positive feedback.
Analytics Firebase:
There was a voice calling failure down to 10% (from 30%)
Some small change on the unlocked and idle time (which should be revisited)
Customer Service:
There was a major sigh of relief on the Helpine with calls concerning voice-calling & mistakes approximately (50%) less. To the astonishment of the Customer Service, people would call to congratulate us with quotes like: “I love the colors” & “calling is now easier” etc.