<aside> <img src="/icons/list_gray.svg" alt="/icons/list_gray.svg" width="40px" /> TL;DR: We built a new job type during the pandemic that would enable techs to do same- or next-day repairs on customers’ phones, resulting in an additional 1.1M jobs run through the platform in 2021 (+200%). Also, we had to get real scrappy with our research, since this was happening during the height of the pandemic in 2020.
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Asurion Field was a product that I worked on in 2019 and 2020 that was developed for us by Asurion In-Home Experts to deliver new devices to folks who’d broken theirs really badly. Like, I-can’t-fix-this-thing badly.
But, most of the company’s claims—62% in 2020—were actually just screen repairs.
The question was this: How might we enable our in-home network of experts to help customers in a new way—by repairing their phones.
We had acquired Ubreakifix (UBIF) in 2018, and some markets had already started running jobs with remote repair technicians. We tapped into their knowledge to figure out how to incorporate screen repair jobs into our app for our internal users.
One big issue they were having with the program though, was that techs were often accidentally selecting the wrong job outcomes for customers (honest mistakes), which resulted in a lot of manual interventions to correct. Prior to this project, those UBIF jobs were coming in with the wrong resolution code 12% of the time.
We would need to fix that to scale this thing.
I led design and user research on this project, and got a lot of help along the way from my good friend and fellow designer, Bodhi. I also got to work with my PM pal, Eleni, our tech lead, Kirill, and several other engineers on the team.
Usually, I would have jumped in a Tech's van, gotten eyes on the job, and talked to actual, human users who were on the job.
Instead, I bought a GoPro, found a willing tech, and had him complete a diary study for us so we could get eyes on it from a distance. We learned a lot about the challenges that go along with this kind of work, and it was a great way to understand some of the intricacies of the work.
We really leaned on that UBIF team during our discovery. This was the summer of 2020, so it’s not like we could just do research the way we normally did. We had so many zoom meetings, a bunch of on-the-go FaceTimes with users, and learned all kinds of new ways to learn what we needed to learn.
We initially imagined that the screen repair job would be pretty linear, but we found out rather quickly that it wasn’t. There were way more outcomes to a job than we realized—it wasn’t as simple as “successful-” or “unsuccessful-repair”.