Enterprise Design System — Harwin Chandra

The two largest UK telecommunications companies, Virgin Media and O2, joined forces to create the single largest telco provider, through a £31 billion merger. The Mission: enhance their competitiveness against industry giants like Sky and BT.

Our design challenge is to enable a digital-first enterprise customer experience, by adopting a user-centered design approach. This requires the understanding of the different customer types, building a sustainable design system framework, and developing connected digital services that reflect the evolving needs of enterprise customers.

The program drives closer collaboration between the two brands, resulting in enhanced brand cohesion and a consistent customer experience.
The design system significantly decreased development time by 50% and expedited the delivery of the brand's digital presence.

A rapid 24-week program delivered by three workstreams

Workstream one - Building a Sustainable Design System

The challenge for my design team was to articulate the digital system that seamlessly integrates the well-established brand languages of both companies. Our ambition is to create a robust, scalable, and easy-to-maintain design system with greater flexibility and reusability.

We adhered to strict Master brand guidelines where each parent brand has an equal default presence, but could be expressed differently depending on product, content, and context.

Workstream two - Defining The Enterprise Customer Types

The VMO2 enterprise solution services have been delivered using a traditional retail model, lacking a significant digital presence. We engaged with over 20 key decision-makers who research and buy telco enterprise solutions to gain insight into the current journey and understand what we can do differently to create a more digitised experience for enterprise customers.

We developed a suite of artefacts to better understand customer types and the mental models around taxonomy, search approach, and pain points.

Workstream three - The Enterprise Information Architecture

Virgin Media and O2 Business has five live sites containing 200+ business customer products and solutions. Navigating between these sites is not an optimal experience, and steps need to be taken to unify them under a single, cohesive experience.

We bring order to this complexity by designing a customer-focused Information architecture. This approach allows customers to find the right content that makes sense to them at the right point in their online journey in the most seamless way, resulting in increased conversion, reduced support calls, and building brand trust.