Problem
In these high-footfall stores, every minute counts. Advisors had to juggle complex plan options, upsells, and hardware bundles. The legacy tablet system was slow, rigid, and built without a deep understanding of how advisors think and sell. The business goal was clear: increase throughput (more sales per shift), reduce cognitive burden on advisors, and align the in-store tool with BT's product ecosystem.
Discovery
Heuristic evaluation
As the platform was only available on company-provided tablets for Store Advisors, we weren't immediately familiar with the journey. So we printed off each step and stuck it onto a whiteboard, going through it screen by screen to highlight experience blockers, accessibility issues, and design problems.
User research and persona creation
We had little usable data on in-store behavior, so I partnered with our User Research Lead to visit multiple stores and observe both advisors and customers firsthand. We documented patterns, distilled them into a report, and identified a key gap: while we had personas for online users, we had none for in-store advisors, the people actually selling.
Using our findings, I created new advisor and customer personas that captured real behaviors and sales styles. These have since become a go-to reference across the digital team, offering a more grounded, less marketing-driven view of our users.
Create
Prototyping and testing
Working within technical constraints, I used existing design patterns to prototype the new flow in Axure. Our Product Owner, a former Store Manager, helped bring real Advisors and Managers into the usability lab to test it. Their feedback was positive and directly informed several iterations.
A few key insights stood out: advisors are super-users who prefer minimal information compared to the website, performance issues (not just design) were slowing them down, and the tablet-first approach fit perfectly with how they sell in stores.
Final design
I took these learnings and moved away from the old list-format view. Advisors had responded well in testing to horizontal cards, so I took the information that used to sit under each list entry and distilled it down to the essentials needed to proceed with a sale. That became the base for each card. I also liaised with other designers in the business, who were redesigning our product listings into a similar card-based format.
Some of the information I'd removed from the cards still needed to be available for contractual reasons, so I found various ways to surface it elsewhere. For example, our premium Complete Wi-Fi offering was available through a toggle, and extra details like channel listings could be accessed through a pop-up.
The order summary page was previously unclear, and we'd heard this was often a moment where the advisor would show the customer the page and talk through what they'd agreed. We also introduced a basket page so orders could be edited before reaching the final summary.
I worked closely with our development team to make sure Store Advisors got the sales tool they needed, using Zeplin to deliver the final visuals and assets and keeping regular dialogue open throughout.
Outcome
Post-launch, advisors saw measurable efficiency gains: they could serve 1–2 extra customers per shift, adding up to real sales volume. The new card-based UI reduced screen count and cognitive load, and the platform aligned better with BT's own digital pattern, which was also moving toward card-based product listings. Crucially, the tool became more of a selling assistant than a pain point.
This project reaffirmed that sometimes the best design isn't adding features. It's removing friction. In retail, speed and clarity beat "nice to haves." With more runway, I'd want deeper tracking (time per step, error rates) before and after launch to quantify the impact more precisely, and more A/B testing on toggle interactions to refine how hidden data is accessed.