Overview
Belong offers data banking and gifting as part of its mobile services. As Belong’s customer base grows, an increasing number of users are not fully utilising their monthly data allowances. This trend could pose a potential challenge for the business
Problem
With over 115 million GB of banked data, Belong, wanted to find out how it could incentivise and encourage users to use some of their data.
Solution
Not a solution but it was more how might look at how we could incentise customers to donate more of their data. Whether that be uplifting the CX, or a complete redesign.
Deliverables
Unfortunately due to a business restructure and prioritisation - this project got paused and never saw the light of day. Despite that, there we still delivered research into the data gifting and how customer perceives it.
Impact
Due to the business decision to pause this project, however, if implemented there would've have been an UX uplift of the data gifting journey.
Process
Because data banking and gifting is niche product and feature - our main focused was was looking the discovery of each product, understand the user needs and business of the products and expectations. Once validated the research and idea, work with stakeholders to figure what we could delivery to enhance data gifting and banking.
Researchhhhhhh....lots of research
Before any design work could be done - we had to do a big piece of discovery on what exactly is 'data gifting', and 'data banking' and what they both mean to users.
Data banking is the concept of your unused mobile data rolling over into your next bill. For example, if you had 10GB unused data out of 20G, when you next bill comes around you will have 30GB spare. Like the name implies, data gifting is simply gifting data to another customer (in our case, on the same network).
Because these feature aren't well known, we wanted to find out what they mean to users and how they use it. We set up interviews with 9 users who either bank their data, and/or gift data to understand what they use it for.
Key findings
User have an average for 200gb stored/banked
Gifters usually give to an sibling or family member
Data banking is quite important to users
70% of users were aware of data banking but only 55% for gifting
Who does data banking and gifting?
After initial user research, we did competitor analysis of the market to find what other providers offer and how we could benefit. From our research we found that:
Most providers offer either data gifting or banking never both (Belong's unique selling point)
Other providers were restrictive on the amount you could send
We also took this opportunity to understand areas where we could improve and they were:
Uplifting the current CX of our data gifting journey
We should create a landing page to create awareness of data banking/gifting
Blue Sky Ideas
After research for we deciding out how we could reimagine the data gifting feature to allow for customer to use more of their data. For this, we came up with some blue sky ideas like;
Family data pool
Donating to charities or someone in need
Giving back data to Belong
Personalisation - inticing users who barely use data to go to a lower plan
Pausing paying for their plan
We then took these ideas to more users to get their insights and we found that
Most users would love to do something with their space data
Users loved the idea of donating it to someone in need
A family data pool
All users loved pausing paying for their plan
Business validation
To flesh out these blue sky ideas - we took the ideas to the business and did an ideation workshop with them. This workshop consisted of delivery leads, solution leads, devs, product owners and commercial.
The workshop consisted of feasibility talk and out of all the blue sky ideas the the following two were preferred by the team;
Allowing customers to pause their plan
Data lottery for customers with a rewards system
Due too much effort and moving parts exploring blue sky ideas was paused and the focus shifted to uplifting the current experience.
UX Uplifts
Uplifting the current journey didn't really need much thought. From the journey there was obvious uplift like:
Showing the balance of data someone has
Contact list
Quick data amount tiles
We also looked at making the gifting experience a quick 2-tap experience by exploring adding a gifting functionality to the main dashboard where you service is like. From our user research, users compared gifting data as the same sending money so we wanted the experience to be as easy as that. We also wanted to incorporate how a customer might understand their data usage with a data breakdown.
Below are screenshot of the currently gifting screen and lo-fi designs of a new data gifting screen and a quick gift pop up tile. We tested both designs among another set of users and both were well received and features like quick tiles and saved contacts were the favourites.
And unfortunate ending...
Outcome & next steps
Unfortunately due to a business restructure and prioritisation - this project got paused and never saw the light of day. Despite that, there we still delivered research into the data gifting and how customer perceives it.