Prologue

About Celcom

Celcom is an organization with over 3,000 employees committed to advancing the national agenda of developing the capacities and capabilities of Malaysian society. Celcom has the widest network in Malaysia, with a population coverage of 95% for 2G, 93% for 3G, and 90% for 4G/LTE networks.

It provides both prepaid and postpaid mobile and digital services, serving close to 9.1 million subscribers.

My Journey with Celcom

I joined Celcom as a Product Designer in July 2018, during a period of substantial digital transformation (with IBMiX). Celcom was introducing and developing multiple digital products, including a portal, app, e-commerce platform, and retail solutions.

As a Product Designer for the mobile application track, my primary responsibility was to lead participatory requirements gathering sessions. I analyzed stakeholder interviews to understand key success factors for a project or pursuit, and translated them into functional solutions such as journeys, screen flows, and low and high-fidelity prototypes.

🤔 “Something is not right”

As we entered the post-revamp era of digital transformation for the company's mobile app, Celcom Life 2.0 quickly received cosmetic upgrades over 1.0, including a dashboard and pay bill journey overhaul.

However, not long after implementing the new upgrades and familiarizing myself with how the business and the app worked, I encountered challenges that slowed our progress and blocked us from becoming a great product.

Celcom Life 1.0

Celcom Life 2.0

Challenge #1:

Business and Design challenges: Celcom Life 2.0 itself

The BMiX team was rushing to meet deadlines with the 2.0 revamp. The revamp was built on top of legacy in hybrid mode, and most of the features were just reskins mirrored over 1.0. This exposed the app to multiple threats:

• Performance
  • Stitching and patching on top of legacy caused sluggishness and received many complaints from users. Though the lag was not caused by design, it is part of the experience.
• Scalability
  • The dial-based non-scrollable dashboard is clean, aesthetic, and minimal, but it has limitations to scale. For example, each time a new requirement came in, entries from the bubble button had to give way, and business always had to fight for the only real estate.
  • Because it failed to cater to the requirements, the decline stage of the product life cycle hit just after 6 months of deployment and struggled in hitting the expected in-app transaction KPI.
• Lack of innovation
  • The revamp focused too much on UI and cosmetics, while usability issues were not properly treated, leaving a huge room for improvements. These issues were obtained from qualitative and quantitative findings, which I will further elaborate in the future.

Towards the end of 2018, Celcom Life 2.0 had 1.5 million active users out of 7 million active customers.