Case Study
UST streamlines global Telco's app suite, boosts feature delivery by 50%
CLIENT
This multinational telecommunications holding company was founded nearly 30 years ago after a series of mergers and corporate restructuring initiatives. Today, it operates several highly recognizable cellular services companies across Europe and North America. More than 70,000 employees worldwide serve nearly 115 million customers.
CHALLENGE
Home-grown application suite failed to meet needs of developers and business users
The company’s IT team designed and deployed a suite of multiple applications to manage commerce, security, cloud infrastructure, and the like. However, adoption was lower than expected because the application suite lacked a cohesive user experience. People had to navigate siloed, incompatible systems and processes to complete work, which reduced productivity, caused frustration, and lowered the overall business value of the application suite.
The fragmented application suite was burdened with various points of friction, leading to inconsistencies and unpredictability for application designers and developers throughout the application development lifecycle.
TRANSFORMATION
Centralized design system unified disparate applications and enhanced user experiences
UST took a holistic approach to unify the different applications by delivering:
- A consistent visual hierarchy and user interface (UI) structure—using a foundational design system that organized data and guided users through tasks and workflows.
- A uniform user experience—with common and easily recognizable calls to action, labeling, taxonomy, and in-task contextualization across applications.
- A standardized code base—enabling developers to implement thousands of designed datasets with one piece of code.
IMPACT
Effective application design boosted business value
After unifying the suite of applications with streamlined navigation and intuitive workflows, user adoption significantly improved. The reusable design components also reduced technical debt and helped the company achieve these business benefits:
- 50%—increase in delivery of new features across applications
- 40%—reduction in design production time
- 35%—reduction in developer production cycles