myMTN App — Redesigning Ghana's National Telecom Experience.
Background
The myMTN app is a self-service mobile application developed by MTN, one of Africa's largest telecom providers. It allows users to manage their MTN accounts conveniently from their smartphones. Key features include:
- Buy, share, or borrow airtime and data bundles.
- Check balances, usage history, and subscriptions.
- Pay postpaid bills, utilities, and other services.
- Access personalized offers, loyalty rewards, and promotions.
- Chat with support, locate service centers, and submit requests.
The Problem
As the primary digital channel where users can manage their MTN accounts and access products and services remotely, the myMTN app doesn't give users the best experience in terms of usability and accessibility. This led to low user engagement, adoption, and retention.
Problem statements
Some of the highest revenue generation features were hidden behind a lot of steps. This led to high drop off and low discoverability of such features. Funnel analyses showed that averagely 53.76% of users landed on the shop page, where the products were displayed, from the homepage.
There was low discoverability and usage of the app's chatbot assistant due to it's placement on the app, which did not follow the mental model users' have. The chatbot acts as a self service alternative for users and saves the business costs as well. The low discoverability led to an average of 150k monthly active users out of 4 million users who patronize the app.
Error messages in the app were not clear and did not help users to know the root cause of their errors so they can easily recover from them. This led to a lot of drop off and missed opportunities in conversion.
The overall UI was not up to standard, which led to user dissatisfaction, low ratings, and bad user reviews.
The overall information architecture of the application was lacking, which led to impaired journeys that did not follow UX standards and led to user drop offs and increased time on tasks. Most users resort to USSD which leads to low monthly active users on the app.
Specific goals
- Increase user engagement
- Decrease time spent on key journeys
- Improve error recovery
- Improve accessibility for visually impaired users
Focus metrics
- Time-On-Task
- Task Success Rate
- User Error Occurrence Rate
Design Process
Research &
Discovery
Specific issues we discovered with the app
Visually impaired users are not able to log into the app on iOS as the VoiceOver feature is not able to pick the components orderly.
Users do not understand the error messages they receive and so are not able to take the appropriate actions.
Users want to login, send money, and perform other transactions but due to OTP delays, they resort to USSD.
Users were having a hard time locating some features on the app. Other times, they were not aware at all that some features exist on the app.
Users find the journey on the USSD channels more straightforward and intuitive than the app journeys.
How we discovered them
- Analytics review
- Surveys and questionnaires
- A/B testing
- Focus groups
- Interviews
- Field studies
- Usability testing
- Heuristic evaluation
How exactly I help
During the research sessions we have, my role is to:
- Recruit participants
- Review research plan and interview protocol from design team
- Conduct interviews - one on one and focus groups
- Create surveys
- Review research reports from design team
- Translate research results into design and development user stories for design and dev team
User Feedback
Solutions
Visually impaired users are not able to log into the app on iOS as the VoiceOver feature is not able to pick the components orderly.
Organised a usability testing session with select visually impaired participants - all stakeholders were in attendance, from devs to IT to marketing.
We watched the participants use the app as they would in their normal lives, highlighting the high volume journeys in the app.
We noted down the issues they had and sent them on their merry way.
We took our notes, translated them into tasks, sorted them into dev tasks and design tasks and got to work!
Users find the journey on the USSD channels more straightforward and intuitive that the app journeys.
Most users use USSD, even if they have the app installed.
We couldn't take that sentiment, so we set out to redesign the entire interface and journeys in the app.
We brought key actions like balance top-up to the homepage so users could easily access it.
We consolidated some of the steps for purchasing airtime and bundles on one page so users have less taps, which led to less time spent.
Old Interface
New Interface
Users do not understand the error messages they receive and so are not able to take the appropriate actions.
We compiled all error messages and crafted new ones following the #1 and #9 rules of the 10 Jakob Nielson's UX heuristics.
We then redesigned the error, success and pending pages, made them less cluttered, incorporated more white space and introduced the MTN chatbot mascot, Zigi, to give the pages a somewhat humane touch.
We re-looked at the CTAs on these pages and made them more persuasive, leading users to perform another transaction or to retry a failed transaction instead of just ending the flow.
Compilation of old error messages
Revised Error and Success page with more precise messaging
Error Page
Success Page
There was low discoverability and usage of the app's chatbot assistant due to its placement on the app, which did not follow the mental model users have.
Placing the chatbot icon in a bottom right corner of the app, like users are used to, increased its visibility and discoverability.
Before
After
Some of the highest revenue generation features were hidden behind a lot of steps. This led to high drop off and low discoverability of such features.
A redesign that prioritized most used and highest revenue generating features and brought them to the homepage.
Before
After
One of the most asked for features by users was a dark mode version they could switch to.
We delivered a sleek, functional dark mode.
