CUA of the Month – November, 2008

Designing a Whole New World for Globe
Mobile Provider Takes On a User-Centered Philosophy

by Doug Gorney

Usability specialists are usually charged with applying user-centered design to a particular product, website, or process. It's not often that they get to make a whole company more usable. But then Globe Telecom is no ordinary company – and they have no ordinary usability team.

Globe is the #2 mobile phone provider in the Philippines, with more than 20 million subscribers. While it led the market with an extensive range of innovative, convenient value-added services that no one else offered, Globe discovered usability was key to its continuing growth.

The company realized this was more than a marketing issue. With Globe's focus on offering more features, no one had been looking at how they all worked together. Senior management realized that the nature of the user experience was keeping subscribers from taking advantage of more services.

It was a wakeup call. "There was no formal usability at Globe," says April Cabello, Globe Telecom's Usability Manager. In fact, the company didn't even have a dedicated usability specialist on staff. Romeo "Romy" De Villa, now the head of Globe Telecom's usability team, was commissioned by senior executives to form a usability group that would analyze Globe's services from the perspective of the user experience.

Romy found a willing ally in April, a recent Globe recruit. April realized that she, Romy, and their small team needed to sharpen their understanding of user-centered design with some formal usability training. Their research led them to HFI's Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) training program.

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Designing a Whole New World for Globe... (Continued)

Romy and April sent their entire five-person usability team to the training, but they didn't stop there. "We knew that culture change at an organization as large and complex as Globe means getting 'buy-in' from major stakeholders and influencers across the organization," says April. So Romy lobbied project managers, technical managers, and marketing personnel about the importance of usability, and many ended up joining the team for the training HFI offered at a Manila hotel. Most of the 16 people who took the sessions aren't directly responsible for performing user-centered design – but they are all well-equipped to champion usability in Globe Telecom's day-to-day operations and strategic decision-making.

The newly-certified team arrived back at Globe ready to execute a service-wide relaunch, pushed by the company's top management. The initiative was based around two fundamental promises to customers – providing services that are easy to use and relevant. HFI's experts were brought in – on Romy's recommendation – to guide the relaunch, and the group went to work.

April managed the project and collaborated with marketing, business owners, and other units at Globe. Andres Montiel, the team's UI designer, managed outsourced designers and developers who created wireframes and detailed design. He leveraged his background in Web and WAP1 engineering to support HFI's expert review of Globe's Web and WAP channels and phone applications. Ease-of-Use Analyst Mary Ann Lee coordinated usability lab testing and worked with HFI on SMS2 services and SIM OTA3 menus.

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Designing a Whole New World for Globe... (Continued)

The team's diverse background – in communication, information and application design, and human resources – makes it well-suited to the broad range of tasks involved in redesigning and testing more than a dozen types of applications. The team has since developed and applied user-centered design standards to ensure a positive and consistent user experience. Rolling the redesigned services out one by one, Globe quickly saw downloads shoot up within a few months, along with a steady increase in content access.

Globe's relaunch has given the usability team invaluable experience in solidifying the principles they learned in their CUA training. In April's view, redesigning the whole range of Globe's services is only the beginning of an even wider and more important goal: making usability a cornerstone of Globe Telecom's planning, culture, and mission.

"We're excited about having so many CUAs on our core team and throughout the organization (12 total)," April says. "Usability has to play a larger role here. We really want to make sure that at its heart, Globe Telecom has a user-centered philosophy."

Sounds like her team is making a world of difference.

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1. Wireless Application Protocol – used for viewing Web pages on mobile wireless devices
2. Short Messaging Service – a protocol allowing short text messages to be sent between mobile phones
3. Over The Air – allows mobile phones to use their SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards to access and update value-added content

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