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We came up with this idea when I was the Creative Director at Tribeca Media in Lima, Peru, working for Entel Perú, a huge Chilean telecommunications company.

It consists of an app to send “connection agreements” to your contacts. If they approved this agreement, both your and his/her cell phones would disable WiFi and data connections. So these two people could actually connect in real life without their phones disturbing their reality.

About design, it was quite a big challenge to make it user centered since an app that disables your phone connection can be too intrusive. It had to keep the corporate identity while making it kind and funny enough to be welcomed by users.

UNDERSTANDING OUR TARGET CUSTOMERS

In this case, our customer persona was very clear since Entel had already been our client for a year, and we had worked on several campaigns with the same target.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Charlie, 27 years old
Lives in Madrid, sharing a flat with other 2 people
Works as a Junior Financial Consultant, 30 min far by public transport
Single, but has a girlfriend
Big circle of friends

BEHAVIORS

Cell phone heavy user
Active social life, both with girlfriend and friends
Never uses his phone when meeting someone
Argues with everybody about this matter and feels misunderstood

NEEDS & GOALS

Making his girlfriend and friends stop using their phones when meeting him
Not making them angry because of this issue

In previous research, we had learnt how this profile of people was generally using their mobile phones, so we worked directly on the ideal proto journeys to be considered by both sides: sender and receiver.

They look like this:

Only by doing this simple exercise together with the development team, we come up with the conclusion that the first idea of automatically disabling the phone connections was wrong:

Technically, in iOS, there is a problem with permissions. I can’t give the permission to disable WiFi nor data connections to an app. The only way in this OS was to throw a notification.
Also, if I am waiting for an important e-mail or so, I wouldn’t like to stay with no connection at all. Therefore, to avoid working on complex exceptions, the best option is to give the alternative to activate the agreement or not.

Next, considering how short the deadlines were, we decided to start prototyping only with this information and hypotheses to have something more tangible to be tested.

PROTOTYPING

Again, since our deadlines were really short, we started prototyping with high fidelity wireframes and we got a first interactive product to be tested.

The target of this test was 10 people who received a connection agreement request. We studied their reaction, how difficult was for them to understand the goal of this app, if they were willing to download it and, finally, if they could send connection agreements to other contacts.

According to the technical limitations of this prototype, we only could test these hypotheses. We couldn’t work with real contacts, nor with the geolocalization and disconnection notifications.

Anyway, this research already gave to us some good conclusions:

By reading the description and looking at the screenshots we were going to include in the app stores, they generally (80%) were curious and wanted to download it.
They admitted that our app’s goal was easy to be understood and the content included on the welcome screens was clear and explanatory enough.
They were perfectly (100%) able to complete the action of sending requests to other contacts.
We had focused on the process of sending agreements but we had forgotten to show if any contact with an active agreement was close enough to disconnect the phones.

Considering this feedback, we made some corrections and defined our app’s final site map.

FINAL DESIGNS

The next step before starting the development was to convert the wireframes we had, considering the corrections, to final designs. Also, we designed some new screens we had not considered in the prototype and we decided to include them in the site map after the research.

Moreover, after talking with the developers, we learned there were some issues related to Apple’s restrictions according to the app permissions we needed to disconnect WiFi and data connections. Therefore, we had to design also other new CTA screens to explain to the user in a friendly way how to disconnect it manually.

These were the last details and once we had them our app was concluded and developed. It worked perfectly and the client was very happy with the result, even though they got their communication budget cut and it had to be promoted more organically.

2016

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ADVERTISING | STRATEGY | ux | ui | ART DIRECTION

CLIENT - ENTEL

UNDERSTANDING OUR TARGET CUSTOMERS

PROTOTYPING

FINAL DESIGNS