Lessons learned after designing the Telekom Website
5 mins read
The story started in May 2014 when we were chosen to design the Telekom.ro website, a pillar in the Telekom Romania online strategy. Our experience in the previous year, with designing the Cosmote website, recommended us as a digital agency that delivers quality and on-time design. Now that the website is live, we can take a small break and share with you the great news and some things that helped us in the process.
Responsibility
Designing a website for a big company is no easy task, especially not for the faint-hearted. We knew this would be a complex project, but with the right people and an open mind, work unfolded easily and with few bumps on the road. We saw billboards, ads on the TV and Magenta everywhere around the country. We knew this was something big. So, instead of scaring us, we saw it as a challenge and pushed ourselves even more. We celebrated tiny victories, having the end-goal in mind at all times and the sense of being a part of something bigger made us enjoy the responsibility and the opportunity.
Balancing Perfection with Deadlines
One of our favorite quotes is: “Everything will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, then it’s not the end”. We tend to have perfectionist tendencies and pixel-perfect is not something to laugh at in our company. When you combine this tendency with deadlines, you could get an interesting mix. Instead of cutting corners, we chose to allocate more resources and time to the project to get the job done.
Telekom Package Page UX Design
One of the challenges, at the time, was to merge all 7 services the company provided into one website. These services were TV, Internet, Landline, Mobile, Telephone, Tablet, and Device Shop. When it comes to perfection, we do understand there is a distinction between vital and nice things to have. The skill of knowing what and when to prioritize develops with time, but luckily we had the experience and intuition to find them.
The first takeaway of this would be: when it comes to big digital projects, make sure you have all the resources needed. And the second takeaway is the fact that details are indeed important, but you must be careful, some things are truly vital while others are nice to have.
User Experience
It might seem easy to add content on a website and hope it will stick. But it takes more if you want your visitors to have an amazing user experience. A lot of assumptions were challenged and the truth remained. All you need to recharge a Prepaid SIM Card is an account, a phone number, money, and a button, no extra gimmicks.
We are UX designers and we integrated user experience consultancy and problem-solving skills in the design process. Therefore we spent a lot of time asking questions like:
- Is the user flow easy to understand?
- What’s the next step that the user will take?
- Can we show this in a simpler way?
- Does the user have enough information to make a decision?
…and many many more.
Things will not always go the way you like it. Find the best solution for the given time frame.
Trusting Your Business Partner
Trust is something important in every relationship, personal or professional. You have to trust the decisions the other party makes and the information it provides. Telekom offered us the right amount of information and we had to transform it into a working design. They trusted us with fixing up the details and filling the gaps as the time was short and we trusted them with the information they provided. We knew that, at almost any hour, if we needed something, they would manage to find a way to help. Trusting the skill and experience of each party saved us a lot of time and irrelevant discussions. So, before starting your creative work, make sure you’re at the same level of trust with your client.
In the end, we can say it was an amazing experience and we are happy that we could deliver quality and on-time design. These words are only the tip of the whole process that took place in the last months. There is so much to share, but for now, we will let our work speak for itself.
Congrats Deutsche Telekom for launching your flagship brand in Romania and thank you for the amazing opportunity you offered us.
Check the site at www.telekom.ro
