Lead Agency: Kiaroskuro
Roles: Creative Direction, UX Design, Art Direction, Client Management
Apps: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign
Globalstar is a leading provider of independent GPS satellite and positioning devices. With the release of their new SPOT device, they needed a revamp of:
1. The confusing and outdated onboarding process
2. Account management experience that was built over years with features added in odd places
3. Anticipating a system that can allow.
One of the world’s largest retailers had stalled on an order due to concerns about product returns by customers being confused by the activation and account management portion of the site. UX was literally going to make their sale! This also had to occur in a short period of time and on a tight budget, so I set up the wires to quickly turn into high-res comps with universally applied styles that would update all of the wires into real-world comps.
The SPOT device is a simple tracker about the size of a pager. For the consumer market with a specific target:
| Market Share | Demgraphic | Lifestyle | Hobbies | Behavior | Assets | |
| User 1 | 20% | Male, 45-65 Upscale | Family Oriented Traveling Entertaining | Regular Exercise Solo Outdoor Sports Nutritionally Concious | Brand Loyal Store & Online Shopping Researches Products | Has Real Estate Stock, Security Investments |
| User 2 | 80% | Corporate | NA | NA | NA | NA |
Their main focus was to roll it out to men, aged 45-65 years with enough money to have pleasure/hobby crafts like boats, motorcycles and snowmobiles. This group already had the expendable income to purchase a few of their other devices for going on their personal adventures. The particular pain point they were trying to hit was a sense of security with the ability to track the theft of those vehicles. These trackers were small placed nearly anywhere.
There was also a future plan to market it to private companies to be placed in containers or shippable items, so the system needed to be expandable to include tracking and cataloguing for hundreds of devices.
After going through the site and making a zillion screen shots to audit the flows through out the site, I noted areas of improvement.
First, I determined the features that would best suit the user-group and began the simplification process. The sign-up experience had multiple steps on very long pages of forms that became more confusing deeper into the sign up process. The first addition was a bread crumb that identified where they were throughout the process. Way-finding mechanisms were extremely important for new users. Features were also reclassified into large buckets of information that were device and account specific.
Once the device is activated, the user needs to know what to do to get it to sync up with the satellite, how to update it, and how to select preferences. This needed to feel simple, friendly, and on brand.
A user with more than one device would be presented with an interface allowing them to go to a specific device and modify it.
The update worked. Globalstar had a huge win with thousands of units sold to the retailer. My personal victory came when my father-in-law, who bought the SPOT device for a kayaking trip, finally understood what I do for a living.
