Omnichannel user roles and permissions

I led a team to define a roles and permissions target experience for all AT&T customers, unifying multiple product initiatives under a single vision.

2022 | 4 months - 2 phases

My title

Senior Lead UX Designer

My role

Project lead

Team

2 designers
1 content designer
2 researchers
1 program manager

Accolades for this work

Key Partner Award, 2022

—Awarded by AVP, AT&T CX Consumer Wireless

Challenges

It's difficult for AT&T customers to share account management access with family and friends

Customer challenges

Account owners have to manage everyone on their account.

Everyone else on the account is treated like a non-customer because AT&T can’t authenticate them.

What it means for AT&T

AT&T doesn’t know how many customers they have.
Customers sharing credentials presents security risks.
The business is missing opportunities for direct sales with "invisible" customers.
Unauthenticated customers call more to resolve an issue — driving call center costs.

Hypothesis

Omnichannel roles make it easier for

all AT&T customers

to buy, use, and manage their services—anywhere, anytime.

Projected business outcomes

Estimated savings of $200M+ billing and payment cost savings

Enables AT&T to develop direct relationships with ~35M additional customers

$465M in new cross-sell opportunities

Impact

Our work laid the groundwork for real impact—AT&Ts SplitPay feature is live

The SplitPay feature that launched in early 2025 is an outcome of the target customer experience we defined. Our work highlighted this use-case and provided the framework and experience standards to the teams delivering this feature.

We reshaped how AT&T views their relationship to customers

Our work articulated and inspired a shift in how product and business leaders think about modern customers.

From a head-of the household model to connected groups, spanning generations and geographies

We set the customer vision to unify critical product initiatives

Enabled a holistic authentic strategy while expanding to new platforms.

Created a foundation for AT&T’s multi-year billing strategy.

Provided SalesForce migration a framework for customer identity.

What I did

Led a design team in a player-coach capacity to define a target experience

Discover

Opportunity brief
Stakeholder interviews
Review of past work
Competitive, comparative analysis
Customer surveys
Customer interviews

Define

Roles framework
Use cases & scope
Customer segments
Stakeholder activity

Ideate & test

Customer journeys
Storyboard concepts
Testing with customers
Research readout

Design & deliver

Grayscale prototypes
Target experience
Reference designs
Service blueprint
Executive brief

Discover

Program kickoff & discovery research

Our goals in discovery were to understand the business problem and customer needs, define opportunities and create alignment with stakeholders.

Opportunity brief and kickoff

We met with key stakeholders to share our plan at the beginning of the program.

Goals

Align on the purpose of our work
Articulate our opportunity
Clarify how we would expand on past work
Highlight upcoming milestones

Stakeholder and SME interviews

We interviewed 10 people across various AT&T teams working on initiatives that would be enabled by a roles and permissions framework.

What we asked about:

Current state of user roles & permissions across AT&T services and channels.
Known customer, business and technology challenges.
Relevant longterm business goals.
What stakeholders see as the ideal state.
Inflight and upcoming initiatives.

Competitive, comparative analysis

We reviewed user roles & permissions experiences for 10 companies in different industries including telecom, e-commerce, finance, technology, etc. I led the team by setting up an evaluation rubric then guided them through the evaluation, pulling insights and crafting a presentation.

What we explored

Experience standards in the consumer landscape
Methods other companies are using
Experience inspiration
Poor experiences to avoid replicating

Takeaways

We defined 4 role archetypes commonly used by other companies.

15 insights across 4 themes:

Visibility, autonomy and responsibility
Access within the ecosystem
Closed groups
Ecosystem naming

Customer surveys

We surveyed 303 customers to get their overall reactions to the new framework and how they want us to talk about roles & permissions.

High-level findings

Customers perceive having roles & permission as useful and are likely to use them to manage account access.
Customers need some flexibility when assigning roles & permissions across different services.
Customers prefer short, concise language when naming roles.

Preferred role names

Account owner
Co-owner
Limited access
View only

Customer interviews

We talked with 9 customers to learn when having roles and permissions is most useful to them so we could begin to frame an ideal experience.

Findings — 7 key insights

As a customer...

I need more roles to manage wireless than I do for internet or TV.
I want to split the bill  so each person can  pay their own wireless charges.
I want everyone on my account to be able to sign in with their own ID.
Everyone on my plan should be able to trouble-shoot service issues.
I want setting up and managing roles to be flexible and easy.
I expect co-owners to be able to do almost everything I can do.
If you offer a set of roles, I’ll use them to manage my shared service.

Synthesis

I led the team in synthesizing all of our findings into a set of next steps and recommendations that we presented to partners prior to ideation and design.

Screenshot 2025-05-16 at 12.14.35 PM.png

Define

Scope and framework definition

We solidified the roles framework and set boundaries for design, exploring critical parts of the customer journey.

Roles framework

We defined a basic framework that included the 4 role types and desirable permissions for each role across all of AT&Ts services. Having this structure set the stage to investigate how the new roles would enable the customer experience.

Considerations

The complexity of wireless account management drove the full scope of roles and permissions.
The framework was compatible with a spectrum of simple to complex services.
The role set could easily be applied to new services and channels in the future.

Design scope

We selected use cases and sections of the customer journey that would be most impactful to address for customers and the business. Core stakeholders weighed in, participating in an activity to help confirm directional agreement.

Insights guiding our selection:

Customers we interviewed called out bill splitting and troubleshooting as priority.
Wireless customers have more to account management tasks that roles would drive value for.

Customers on shared wireless plans inability to split the bill was a known pain point driving billing related costs for AT&T.
Wireless customer who are unauthorized (non-owners) make more calls to agents, per issue when troubleshooting.

Stakeholder activity

I designed and facilitated a collaborative activity between my team and key stakeholders so they could vote on customer scenarios or propose a new one. This created transparency and buy-in before moving on.

Ideate & test

Journey moments and concept testing

With our scope defined, we plotted the important steps along each journey, generated storyboard concepts and got directional feedback from customers.

The basic journey

Design created high-level customer journeys for each scenario while the whole team collaborated to identify key moments integral to our concept testing plan.

Flows and storyboards

Starting with user flows then progressing to storyboards, the team went through a couple rounds of internal ideation and feedback. We created 2 sets of storyboard concepts and a research question guide.

Before beginning the study we shared our test plan with partners to set expectations that research results would be directional leading to another round.

Concept testing

The goal of this research was to use low-fidelity visuals to validate use cases and key moments that best enable customers to use roles. We talked to 8 customers and 2 AT&T mobility agents via remote video sessions.

Key insights

Customers and agents see roles as a way to get owners out of the middle.
Owners want a straightforward role program name.
Customers & agents want clear information and guidance about roles.
Owners and co-owners want to be able to toggle select permissions on/off.
Customers want to be able to customize settings for comms & notifications.
Owners want us to help ensure people pay their part of the bill on time.

Design & deliver

Final testing and deliverables

We expanded the storyboards to low fidelity prototypes for additional testing then synthesized all of our work as final deliverables for partners to reference.

Prototype design

We synthesized feedback from concept testing to build a set of low-fidelity prototypes. Our goal was to create designs that would facilitate flow-level conversations with customers and agents without soliciting UI level feedback.

Testing with customers

This round of customer and agent testing was our last. We used the feedback to update designs and annotations explaining the core customer needs illustrated by final reference designs. The sessions were remote video calls, we talked to 7 customers and 2 agents.

High-level insights

When going to the app or att.com, customers expect to find roles and permissions within their account settings.
Owners believe people on their plan already have a default, non-role.
Customers think the bill-ready notice is a good entry point to the new roles.
Customers want roles & permissions setup to be tailored to the service type.
Customers like being able to customize settings for communications & notifications.
Customers & agents prefer texts, but want to know they can trust them.
Agents want clear information and guidance about roles & permissions.

Target experience deck

This final artifact articulated our most important takeaways. It framed up what's critical to get right for customers and agents, and included directional examples for key concepts.

Inside the deck:

Roles and permissions framework
Themes and principles
Recommendations and insights
Annotated reference designs
Links to supporting documents and studies

Grayscale prototypes

The grayscale prototypes acted as a companion to the annotated designs, allowing product partners to interactively progress through key concepts from the customer’s perspective.

Using low-fidelity was important for downstream teams. Our recommendations were directional so we avoided high-fidelity designs that could mislead people into thinking our recommendations were UI-level.

Service blueprint

We wanted to show the relationships between customers, the front line and underlying processes orchestrating the roles and permissions experience.

It's valuable to partners:

As a reference point for end-to-end experience conversations.
As an aid for planning and writing epics.
To support technology requirement conversations with architects.
To identify experience gaps.
As a starting point for product roadmaps and future state requirements gathering.
As a tool to illustrate transformation moments that business partners have prioritized.

Executive brief

We created a summary of our work to highlight high-level value for business leaders. It served as a jumping-off point for our other artifacts.

Accomplishments

Impact on a national scale

This work created unity of multiple initiatives at a Fortune 50 company by providing the same north star for traditionally siloed product teams.

Engaged stakeholders

Throughout this project we achieved high resonance with our stakeholders and SMEs. A good rapport was built through approachable storytelling that generated open dialogue.

Illustration library

We built a componentized illustration library in Figma available to our whole team. During this project I art directed a collaboration with 2 designers to develop an illustration style that we used in our artifacts. It gained interest from the rest of the team and after the program wrapped up, we built and published a full library.

Reflections

Positive

Happy team

After this program ended teammates regularly volunteered that it had been a really fun and interesting project. I was moved by this and felt a sense of accomplishment. As the lead I'd been intentional about driving quality work, while creating a culture where people felt comfortable being themselves.

Opportunity

Mega decks

I noticed it took too much effort for partners to interpret our mega-decks and service blueprints. These artifacts were comprehensive and had become the standard of our broader design team. Handing off work at the end of this project provided a moment of clarity for me. I saw an opportunity for our team to be better product partners. I took initiative to develop a product design education series, setting methods and standards for being better collaborators and producing clear and concise artifacts. To learn more visit my Customer-centered product design education series case study.