O2 Slovakia is with over 2.3 million mobile customers the second biggest mobile service provider in the Slovak Republic and has been active since 2007. Popular amongst its customers, O2 Slovakia wins the Operator of the Year award every year thanks to its simple and transparent product portfolio.
During my cooperation with IdeaSense (now part of Creative Dock) on a project for O2 Slovakia, our job was to supervise the implementation of new tariffs, explore the role of their UX designers, and teach the UX team to work with the design and continue to work on it without our assistance in the future.
We redefined the role of their UX designers and made a clear distinction between UX and UI. We literally took the UX designer and forbade them from working on UI design, so they could fully focus on UX. This resulted in the need to hire a UI designer who would closely cooperate with the UX designer.
We also connected the UX designers with other teams and departments so they could study the entire process and create quick prototypes, test them, and provide findings before the project moved on to the next phase. Working closely with UI designers and UX testers, while being fully able to focus on their strongest skills: UX design itself. Once we made it possible for UX designers to be present at the moment of idea creation and could join the process early on, they could, for example, understand the product's needs better right from the start, do quick prototyping and testing to determine if the implementation of any idea made sense.
And not just once. With every new spin and twist of the product, they could use prototypes or wireframes to evaluate how well the change benefits the product. This shift helped the UX designers become more involved in the whole process of product creation and benefit other departments of O2 Slovakia from idea creation to final design and, therefore, bring their full potential on board.