The decisions before the decisions
Development · Apr 18, 2013
Re-designing a large website like Telus.com is comparable to sculpting and putting together a difficult puzzle – with dozens of people all doing it at the same time. The writing, imagery, navigation, layout, structure, and graphics all need to work together to create a simple set of pages that inform and delight the user.
One of our primary tenets is to work and act like a start-up. Make more and document less. With multiple teams in different cities and everyone bringing a different piece of the puzzle, it’s often a challenge to produce a single, coherent experience. To compound this, the site is a representation of the products, services, and values of the entire TELUS organization, so there are many other groups who the web team needs to be accountable and open to feedback from. It’s important to keep the website simple and focused. This means being able to absorb and refine the many ideas and directions that inevitably arise from working with a lot of people.
Our goal is to make sure the customer is considered in every decision. Are we making people’s lives easier and better? It’s easy to agree to this in principal but what does it actually mean? How can we be people focused in every decision?
To keep the millions of other TELUS customers in mind, we created Experience Guidelines. What do people want to accomplish, achieve, do, and feel when they interact with our many digital touch points? What are the key pillars that will help the web redesign team write and make design decisions from the customer’s perspective?
This is what putting the customer first means to us:
Be honest with me
Empower customers to make the right decisions by being helpful and transparent.
Make it easy for me
Do the heavy lifting for our customers.
Know me
Be attentive to the customer and anticipate their needs.
Make me smile
Be friendly and fun.
Be there for me
Provide meaningful and instant feedback that makes the customer feel cared for.
Like everything else, we will iterate and refine these principles through the course of the redesign. We’d love your thoughts and suggestions on our Experience Guidelines as we continue to build out the new TELUS website.
