As more Orange apps were developed it became clear that the business could benefit from combining their services into one ‘super app’. Orange decided to pursue this option and asked me to investigate how this could be done.
Task
I began with competitor research, quickly discovering that many services in Asia were adopting this model such as WeChat and Alibaba.
I then looked at ways the UX and app architecture could be constructed to allow multiple apps to combine. As you can imagine creating a navigation of this nature was incredibly complex and required a lot of testing and experimenting.
After a lot of complex UX work, we had the beginnings of a user experience that incorporated all of the Orange services from banking and mobile management to media streaming and transportation.
Actions
With the information architecture in place and a plan for development, I began to create wireframes, and a wireframe prototype to test the UX and interaction design.
I then moved on to the high fidelity designs, these components were developed using my approach of testing designs to failure, each iteration of the component was put through its paces, testing layout, font sizes, content limits and colour combinations all within the Orange brand guidelines. This process ensures the final components are robust and responsive on all platforms and very unlikely to break.
I used the existing and well established Orange design system for the app, and developed some individual dual tone iconography that would be used specifically for Orange Maxit.
The existing Orange design system uses a 3 layer tokenised design system of primitives, semantics and component level tokens, I was happy using this system and contributing to its development. Design tokens ensure components and their instances always remain consistent and organised.
All components had auto-layouts and properties applied so it was easy to swap instances in and out at any stage of the design process.
The designs were then handed over to the development team via Zeplin to ensure assets were available. We also used Trello to manage and correct any bugs in the system.
Results
The final outcome was a super app available in Europe and Africa that combined services and allowed users to manage all of their Orange related services from one app, this model worked well for the African market and was very well received and recognised as a success. The European market was more of a challenge and users were more cautious of an app for everything, citing security as their main concern. Despite some resistance, the app is still growing in the European market and Orange continue to promote and develop the app to better meet this markets expectations.
