64% of customers left at the first step of checkout
Then we rebuilt the funnel inside a 20-year-old system — one shippable win at a time.
Every change had to clear three gates
The most revenue-critical stretch of the purchase journey ran on a platform built two decades earlier — where “ideal” and “shippable” were rarely the same thing.
The leak didn’t stop at step one
Discovery paired behaviour data with session replays and interviews — to learn where people dropped, and why.
Momentum from choosing a plan died at a long form — people saw the wall of fields and left.
A credit check asked for sensitive information without a clear explanation of privacy, security, or how it would be used.
Self-install or professional was chosen for the customer, with no way to change it in the flow. Anyone who wanted the other option had to call an agent.
Two opt-in decisions — paper-free billing and Autopay — too little information to judge either, and a long sign-up behind both. Only 2% enrolled in Autopay.
A long, legal page with interaction behaviour that worked against the reader.
The cart total — the one number people came to confirm — wasn’t shown upfront, and its breakdown was hard to follow.
Six archetypes set what we fixed first
We synthesised six buyer archetypes from the discovery research — from the Budget-Conscious Shopper to the Heavy Remote Worker. They weren’t decoration; they decided which friction we tackled first. And 70% were on mobile — the surface the old flow served worst.
The vision, written in the room
We ran a design co-creation workshop and compressed the brief into one sentence the whole team signed up to. That last clause set the bar — mobile was the test, not the afterthought.
We want to create a simplified, scalable, mobile-first Fios checkout for every kind of customer
So that we cut cognitive load and bring parity across Verizon’s checkouts
We will know we are successful when conversion rises and fallout drops, specifically on mobile.
Five moves that did the work
We drew against that bar and let live testing decide what shipped. Most of the gain came from five moves — and the dynamic sticky footer did the heaviest lifting. The old flow hid the cart and scattered CTAs, so customers reached each decision point without the one thing they needed: a reason to move forward. A persistent footer fixed that — holding the live price, the next action, and a message that surfaced savings the moment they applied.
Your bill is paid automatically each month — no missed due dates, no late fees.
Paper-free billing delivers your statement online instead of by mail.
Stay in control — pause or change either one anytime in billing settings.
Quick wins first, the north star always
The business wanted movement now — so we led with the footer, the most impact for the least cost, then spent the cheap wins and saved the heavier builds for last.
23 → 17 minutes, completion up 18%
Validated two ways. The behavioral gains were proven live, with real customers picking the winner over the old design. Then 21 participants walked the new flow in controlled interviews and told us how it felt.
Real customers picked the winner. Proportions only.
WCAG conformance maintained across the redesign.
Reflection
The two-track model only works if both tracks stay real. If the vision becomes a deck you present quarterly and shipping becomes everything you actually do, the vision quietly dies and the patches become the debt. Keeping the north star buildable — and every ship laddering back to it — was the part that was design leadership, more than any single screen.
What I carry into the next one: protect the north star, and reach it one sprint at a time.