My mission was to simplify, unify, and localize the checkout experience, ensuring it worked effortlessly across the UK while feeling native to the market.

I redesigned the UK checkout flow to be faster, more intuitive, and tailored to user behavior, ensuring a seamless, efficient, and optimised journey.

🚧 The Challenge: A Checkout That Stood in the Way

Imagine needing to top up your phone quickly, but instead of a seamless experience, you are met with;

⚠️&nbsp;Why are there so many steps just to add credit?

🔍&nbsp;Where’s my saved payment method? Do I have to enter it again?

⛔&nbsp;Why does this payment screen look different every time I use it?

For a telecom provider serving millions across Europe, these frustrations led to abandoned transactions, lost revenue, and declining user trust.

💭 How We Started - Defining the UX Direction

We began by immersing ourselves in the vision and goals through workshop, analysing target audience preferences, and uncovering key opportunities for growth.

Exploring the demographic ecosystem gave us valuable insights into user behaviour, setting the stage for a data-driven, user-centric strategy

I developed a SWOT analysis framework to identify growth opportunities for Lebara, focusing on improving customer loyalty, enhancing self-service capabilities, and leveraging omnichannel engagement.

These insights informed the feature roadmap and helped position Lebara as a stronger player in the prepaid/postpaid market.

To understand where our checkout and feature offerings stood in the crowded telecom landscape, I conducted a feature benchmarking audit across top competitors like Vodafone, Airtel, Jio, and Lycamobile.

Common Ground: Shared baseline features like chatbots and SIM swap were table stakes.

Differentiators: Few players offered value-adds like cloud storage, digital wallets, or instant KYC.

User Type Mapping: We bucketed features by&nbsp;New vs Existing users&nbsp;to identify experience gaps and high-impact opportunities.

A&nbsp;competitive feature matrix&nbsp;was built to identify overlaps, white spaces, and innovation potential.By mapping out key capabilities across players like Lebara, Giffgaff, and Amaysim, I uncovered:

Overcrowded Offerings in prepaid, SIM swap, and port-in services.

Underserved Needs&nbsp;in guidance features like “Help Me Choose,” personalised plans, and public hotspot discovery.

Lack of Consistency – Many players offered features but didn’t weave them into checkout journeys.

By mapping the end-to-end journey of our real-time persona, "Catherine a homemaker" looking to switch providers with international calling benefits and I uncovered key friction points across digital and physical touchpoints in Lebara’s experience.

This journey map illuminated actionable insights that shaped improvements in customer support, proactive engagement, and seamless handoffs between online and offline channels.

Recognizing the complexity of managing a postpaid mobile plan, I designed a simplified, intuitive dashboard structure that prioritizes bill transparency, real-time usage tracking, and seamless plan modifications.

This architecture ensures that customers have full control over their subscriptions, reducing churn and increasing satisfaction.

Map the complete user journey – from landing on the website to successful checkout.

Identify friction points using sticky notes and annotations, categorizing challenges into usability, technical, and content gaps.

Benchmark against best practices to align the experience with customer expectations.

💡&nbsp;One-Tap Recharge:&nbsp;A faster, frictionless payment process with saved user preferences.

🧠&nbsp;Smart Localisation:&nbsp;The checkout auto-adapts to regional currencies, languages, and payment methods (e.g., PayPal in Germany, Direct Debit in the UK).

🧩&nbsp;Scalable UI components:&nbsp;To maintain consistency, I designed using a robust design system, designed for multi-region adaptability.

📐&nbsp;Responsive grid system:&nbsp;Ensuring seamless usability across devices.

💰&nbsp;Clear Payment History &amp; Plans:&nbsp;Users can track past transactions &amp; manage plans effortlessly.

🌱&nbsp;Data-Driven Personalisation:&nbsp;Smart suggestions based on user behaviour &amp; payment history.

💥 40% -&nbsp; higher successful transactions

A frictionless checkout experience meant more completed purchases and happier customers.

Transforming a Telecom Checkout Experience

When I joined this project, I wasn’t just stepping into a new role, I was stepping into a&nbsp;world of complexity. The tool was supposed to&nbsp;simplify automation testing, but instead, it was a maze of&nbsp;technical jargon, scattered workflows, and user frustrations.

Testers both manual and automation were spending more time figuring out the tool than actually running tests. Instead of accelerating the testing cycle, the tool&nbsp;slowed them down.

What made this tool fall short compared to competitors?

Before jumping into solutions, I needed to understand the users, the business, and the gaps. I conducted a week-long workshop involving stakeholders, testers, and product teams. Through deep-dives and feature mapping, I pinpointed the key challenges:

👥 Was the platform truly inclusive?&nbsp;

🔍 Could testers find what they needed?&nbsp;

🧠 Did workflows feel intuitive?&nbsp;

✅ Were testers getting instant feedback?&nbsp;

🔓 Was access management secure?

💡 Did the dashboard empower decision-making?&nbsp;

At Go Test Pro, I led the UX efforts to evolve a generic test automation tool into a no-code, AI-powered platform. 

I kicked off the redesign by facilitating stakeholder workshops to uncover core user frustrations, ranging from confusing navigation and lack of accessibility to missing real-time feedback and inefficient workflows

When I embarked on this project, I knew that understanding our users was the key to designing an automation tool that truly met their needs. I wasn’t just building software. I was crafting an experience that would make lives easier, workflows smoother, and decisions smarter. 

To do this, I stepped into the shoes of different personas, each with their own unique expectations, challenges, and thought processes by conducting workshop.

To effectively design for automation testers, I immersed myself in their domain by breaking down key testing components in FigJam, such as test suites, scenarios, steps, and executions. This hands-on analysis helped me bridge the gap between user needs and technical constraints.

Test Managers faced issues with&nbsp;unclear execution results, lack of failure insights, and CI/CD integration gaps&nbsp;in the automation tool. 

This visualization represents a structured approach to prioritizing features for an automation tool. The concentric circles categorize features based on priority levels.

✅ Key Consideration - From Insights to Execution

With these pain points in mind, I devised a human-centered redesign strategy focused on usability, accessibility, and efficiency.

🧲 Streamlined navigation: Restructured the IA, making core functionalities easily discoverable

🤯 No-code, visual workflows: Designed drag-and-drop automation setups for testers with minimal coding knowledge.

🤖 AI-generated test case creation that reduced setup time drastically

✅ Enhanced accessibility: Improved contrast, keyboard navigation, and screen reader support.

🔁 Smart feedback loops: Introduced real-time test result updates and actionable insights.

👥 Role-based user management: Defined clear permissions for admins, testers, and developers.

🌱 A data-rich dashboard: Consolidated key test metrics, error trends, and performance analytics.

I ensured every change was backed by usability testing, iterating based on direct feedback from testers.

🌱 The Results: A No-Code Testing Revolution

⏳ 45% - reduction in setup time for new test cases. 

📈 60% - increase in user adoption among manual testers. 

🚀 30% - faster debugging due to real-time insights. 

🤯 50% - AI-powered test creation boosted automation coverage. 

🤖 Reflections - Unlocking Productivity with AI&nbsp;

Imagine a platform where testers no longer had to&nbsp;script every test manually&nbsp;or waste time navigating a cluttered UI.&nbsp;With AI-driven automation:

🧠 Testers could simply describe a scenario, and AI would generate structured test cases.

🤯 Automated edge case detection&nbsp;ensures better coverage, reducing manual oversight.

🪄 Error-prone scripting is eliminated,&nbsp;making automation accessible to manual testers.

🏆 AI continuously learns from past executions,&nbsp;optimising test cases over time.

AI-powered feature for building custom test workflows with smart test cases, enabling seamless collaboration and efficient execution.

Transforming a Telecom Checkout Experience

Sudharsan Ramesh