Voice Everywhere

TL;DR

I led the design and testing of a modernized telephony app as part of Cox's flagship “Voice Transformation” initiative. The project focused on creating a visually updated and user-centered experience for a legacy product, ensuring aesthetic appeal and seamless usability. Through in-depth research, including psychophysiological testing, we maintained high usability scores while elevating the app's overall look and feel. The final design introduced a gesture-based navigation system tailored to modern devices, successfully balancing innovation with user familiarity.

This project showcases my ability to modernize legacy products by experimenting with UI design to create inventive visuals, leveraging clinical user testing and emerging interaction patterns to deliver a user-centered, modern solution.

TL;DRContext* ✷✧˖Final Design˖✧✷*TestingResults

Context

What it is And Who it's For

A new telephony app connecting home phone service to mobile devices, designed for all Cox phone subscribers as part of the “Voice Transformation” initiative.

My Role

Sole designer collaborating directly with technical SMEs, product owners, and engineers.

Goals

Increase phone subscribers by providing convenient tools to make the service more accessible.

Challenges

Designing a unique brand moment for a legacy, universal experience.

Exploration

This project provided an opportunity to study both the product’s usability and consumer insights to better position a legacy product like telephone for the 21st century. Leveraging advanced testing methods such as psychophysiological feedback, we delivered a modernized experience aligned with current consumer habits.

Embracing Gestures

With the rise of bezel-less phones introducing new interaction patterns, I tested and implemented gesture-based navigation to align with this standard. By replacing the traditional bottom navigation with the iPhone X’s “swipe up to go home” feature, I moved primary navigation to the top of the screen, offering users two intuitive ways to navigate: swiping left to right or tapping the screen.

Testing

Collaborating with our lead researcher, I identified key user tasks, developed the test script, and created seven prototypes—three for competitors' products and four for the Voice Everywhere app. Testing focused on two primary quantitative metrics, SUS and BERT, enabling us to monitor usability while analyzing emotional responses to the new UI and interactions.

Psychophysiological Measures

To further our understanding, we teamed up with Georgia State University to conduct in-clinic user testing with psychophysiological measures. This approach provided deeper insights into the unconscious responses of users which informed the design and functionality of the Voice Everywhere app.

Results

When compared to the original baseline app, our analysis revealed that the “Top Nav” design iteration was successful at increasing the aesthetic enjoyment without sacrificing any perceived usability of the app.