A mobile network that recommends you spend less

EE launched Flex to target customers who didn't want long contracts or phone financing - people buying their phone outright and looking for a simple data plan. The kind of customer conditioned by Netflix and Spotify to expect instant, flexible, cancel-anytime products.

The existing Flex journey was the opposite of that. I worked with the analytics team to triage user feedback and walk through the journey myself. It took 16 minutes and 46 clicks to complete - for a product whose entire proposition was simplicity and flexibility. Conversion was poor, and the feedback made it clear why.

We ran a design sprint to rethink the product from scratch. The idea we landed on was bold: offer a 30-day free trial with unlimited data, monitor the user's actual usage over that month, then recommend a plan based on what they'd really used. No guessing how many gigabytes you need - the app would figure it out.

The business killed the free trial. But the core insight was more important than the mechanic: data measured in gigabytes is an abstract concept. Previous EE research had shown that users couldn't translate gigabytes into real behaviour - how many hours of streaming, how many video calls. Our solution was to stop asking users to understand their data usage and instead show them, honestly, what they were actually using.

That transparency became the design pillar for the whole product. We'd recommend a plan based on real usage. We'd show you your social media data separately so you could see the value of unlimited social. And crucially, we'd recommend a cheaper plan if your usage showed you didn't need what you were paying for.

The app covered three core journeys: ordering a SIM, activating it, and managing your plan. The order journey was stripped back to the minimum - choose a plan, register, pay. The management experience was where the real design thinking lived.

The usage screen showed data remaining with a clear breakdown of what was free (social media) and what counted against your allowance. Over time, the app built up a picture of your actual usage and surfaced a recommended plan based on your last three months. If that recommendation was a cheaper plan, we showed it anyway. Cancel and pause were one tap away, not buried in settings.

The project started as a standalone challenger brand - a distinct sub-brand of EE with its own identity and its own app. We'd scoped for new users only, with clean signup flows and a simple onboarding. Then the direction changed. EE decided Flex would be much more closely aligned with the main brand, and suddenly the scope shifted from "build a new product" to "integrate with everything EE already has."

That meant working with EE's login team to understand how Flex would sit alongside existing EE accounts. We'd originally designed a passwordless registration flow - no password, just a verification email link - but that wasn't technically feasible with EE's auth systems for launch. Instead, users would be redirected to an in-app browser to log in or register with EE. We'd only scoped for new users, but now we had to handle existing EE customers migrating to Flex too. I mapped out every permutation in Figma - new to EE, existing PAYG, existing Flex customers upgrading, affiliates who'd bought a SIM in a shop, eSIM-enabled phones versus physical SIM, customers on WiFi versus mobile network - each with different registration, authentication, and activation paths.

The eSIM work came out of that complexity. My tech lead and I heard about eSIM support coming to EE and saw the opportunity - a SIM-only product that could activate instantly without waiting for a physical card in the post. We approached EE's SIM infrastructure team, understood the technology, and designed the first eSIM activation flows in all of EE before any other team had tackled the UX.

The branding was its own constraint. We'd been told "EE sub-brand" but given almost nothing to work with - a logo and some photos, no UI patterns, no component library. When the direction shifted to align with EE's main brand, I designed a dark mode visual system that let yellow work as the primary highlight colour without the accessibility issues it would cause on a light background, and built the component library from scratch.

We built the entire app during COVID - research, design sprint, wireframes, prototypes, visual design, every customer permutation mapped and tested. It tested well at every stage. It was ready.

The project was shelved before it reached the public. After 18 months of work, that was genuinely crushing.

When the app was demoed to EE's senior leadership, the CEO asked for the features to be built into the main EE app rather than launched as a standalone product. As a freelancer, I moved on - but I stayed in touch with the lead PM on the project, who later told me they'd followed through.