BT Digital launches User Research labs and bolsters design capability with expert digital hires

• Experienced digital design talent joins BT Digital join from Dropbox, Lloyds and Universal Credit
• All-new User Research lab opens at BT Group’s London HQ, with a second to open in Birmingham, to provide deep insight into customer experience and inform customer centric design and product thinking
• Group deploys Design Systems to support BT’s ambition of ‘Inner Source’ ambition of build once, re-use and iterate within design communities

27^th September, London: BT Group’s Digital unit continues to accelerate the Group’s transformation by strengthening its design capability. A new world-class bespoke User Research lab has opened at its London headquarters, and a second will be opening in Birmingham later this year. The new labs will help BT Group better understand its customers and internal colleague needs. Alongside this, Digital also announces several experienced design hires, supporting the unit’s strategy to accelerate and modernise BT Group.

The User Research lab, with its launch led by Digital Design Director for Consumer Digital, Conor Ward (previously from British Gas & Centrica), is a new on-site facility at BT Group’s London HQ for design teams and BT Consumer’s product community to better understand customer’s digital interactions, needs and motivations helping the team to design products, journeys and processes for customer ease and convenience.

 Several new hires within Digital have been made as the business amplifies its design capabilities.

• Julianna Ferreira, who previously held roles at Universal Credit and Microsoft Studios, has joined as Director of Design for Corporate units IT. BT Group’s Corporate units function is home to its Finance, HR, Legal, Corporate and Regulatory Affairs teams.
• Marco Huerta-Riviera has moved to BT from San Francisco to be Director of Design for Enterprise Digital. Marco, who has previously worked for Dropbox and Visa, brings years of B2B design experience and will be looking at streamlining experiences for BT’s business customers.
• Nikki Barton, previously at Lloyds and British Airways, is now Director of Design for Global Digital, working closely with the part of the business that serves international customers. Nikki, a past external examiner for Royal College of Art, brings a wealth of experience in digital design and research, making customer experiences more efficient and user friendly
• Sharan Gandhi, previously at Deliveroo and Aviva is now Head of User Research for Consumer Digital and will be focusing on growing the User Research practice maturity across BT and helping ensure the Consumer customers digital needs are understood, met and exceeded in every interaction.
• The newly created Etc, BT Digital’s start-up and incubation team, also have some expert design talent joining them, including Jess McKenna as Senior Manager Product Design for HealthTech, Teo Gagliano joins as Senior Design Manager, Vicky Onsea and Georgia Cozma join as Product Design Managers and Jane King as Product Researcher.

Across Digital, the Design teams are deploying new ‘Design Systems’, providing consistent approaches to, and libraries of, design and code assets that support faster and more uniform delivery of design across BT Group’s brands. These include the ‘Loop’ design system in Consumer, and support a wider culture of ‘Inner Source’ where BT Group teams build once, re-use, and collectively iterate design, data, documentation and code assets across the group to boost productivity and eliminate duplication of efforts.

Beyond repeatable UI components, BT Digital are also taking the same approach to repeatable journeys through a new “Service Patterns” model. This is led by the Service Design team where entire journeys (not just the user interface but the order of steps, how they integrate with the code) are consumed from multiple locations via a single service pattern, rather than being duplicated and repeated for nuanced scenarios.

“In Digital, we are truly customer obsessed and that’s why our design processes are rooted in co-creation with our customers. This is how we are constantly reinventing and improving the experience for our customers, and why we are bringing together great digital design talent from around the world so they can lead this from the front and help BT on its journey from a telco to a tech co,” concludes Harmeen Mehta, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, BT Group

For more information on current roles, to learn more and to apply, please visit our Digital careers site.