To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Cox Communications or FCB.

Overview

In my year working with the Cox brand we tackled many long standing hurdles facing the cable industry at large, as well as internal organizational entropy.

Thinking about their properties as separate entities only exacerbated the pre-existing conditions. To remedy some of the chaos we looked at 4 main properties:

Cox.com (Primary Site)
Buy-flow (Checkout Experience)
My Account (A place to manage and learn)
Welcome Center (A place to learn and promote momentum through the new user journey)

Role

UX Design & Strategy
Information Architecture
UI Support

Cross Functional Team

Client/Stakeholder Facing
Lead UI Designers + Copywriters
Engineering
Marketing/Social

Agency

FCB Chicago - 2013-2014

Team

Nat Jones, Danielle Riley, Amy Creyer, Paulina Zymon, Phil Paquette

Responsibilities and Contributions

During my time working with Cox I had the opportunity to lead UX at a high level within their organization. The benefit of working for FCB was that I wasn't carrying the long-term baggage that the internal team dealt with daily. I was able to act as an arbiter between teams and support effective changes between business units and resources.

My primary goal and value came at the cross functional level. Letting teams know where we could optimize the experience by letting go of ownership and thinking about the user. I made suggestions and showed the team how users navigate through these complex systems to accomplish (what should be simple) tasks.

The exercises and tools used changed frequently but it always came back to empathy and testing.

The Challenge

How do we create a cohesive experience that raises user confidence, understanding, and utility?

Problems

The cable industry faces constant critisism over pricing and transparency.
New and Existing users both face challenges in account management and understand options with plans universally.

Solutions

Create a single HUB of information.
Be up front with pricing and communicate the end cost at the start.
Create a more friendly welcome experience for new customers while nurturing the existing customers.

Exercises & Artifacts

We had countless interaction with customers & internal COX stakeholders.

These are just a few of the key assets used to guide our solutions.

Sprint Planning

I organized the phases or releases, the requirements and stories to be completed in each sprint with associated design artifacts. Managing these communications across all the Cox properties was arguably one of the most significant contributions as it kept our internal team, and theirs, in lock step.

Persona Research

We had the opportunity to focus the persona research down to the essentials. Ultimately reducing the 30 "top-of-mind" personas down to just 15.

Heuristic Reviews + Competitive Audits

One of my favorite exercises was to plot competitors and their experiences against a basic heuristic analysis.

Customer Journey Mapping

Often we let our biases shift to very specific points within a user's journey. We forget that even though a certain touchpoint may happen only once is it still a crucial step in the process.

Feature Mapping

I used feature maps to communicate disparity between certain jobs and the locations they were housed. Cox struggled greatly with organizing these tools and resources in a way that was clear to the user.

Content Audits

I organized the audits of all support and on-boarding materials so that they could be combined into one seamless resource.

User Flow Diagrams

Workflow analysis and breakdown was very common among our team. One of the artifacts that came out of the analysis and ideation were flow diagrams.

Sitemaps

Cox required copious amounts of information architecture. We had to continually overhaul this and sync with 10+ division to ensure content and tools were in the right homes.