Re-imaging Multi-Line account management
Simplifying financial control for scale
PROJECT
Snapshot
Company: BT Group / EE
timeline: May 2024 - Sept 2025
role: Product Designer
SCOPE: Interaction Design • Design Systems • UX/UI • Prototyping • Product Strategy • Accessibility
collaborators: Product • Engineering • Content Design • User Research • Accessibility
OVERVIEW
A Spend Cap helps customers control spending outside their monthly allowance and avoid unexpected charges. But for customers managing multiple mobile numbers, the existing experience was repetitive & difficult to navigate.
What started as a simple request evolved into a wider redesign of the experience, introducing a more visual and interactive way to manage Spend Cap individually or across multiple lines.
THE challenge
Spend Cap is an important form of financial protection. It helps customers stay in control of unexpected charges and reduce the risk of bill shock. But our legacy experience was text heavy, buried in a page within our Settings and designed around one number at a time.
the original journey
Customers managing multiple accounts had to return to our homepage, select a number, navigate back to Settings, manage its Spend Cap, then repeat the entire process for every additional line.
… and then repeat the journey for each phone number
Aside from the tedious repetition, the biggest issue was that it wasn’t clear what number customers were managing.
The Spend Cap page didn't identify the active number or have any positive feedback to confirm which number a change had been applied to. This led to some customers beliving they had protected their whole account when they had only changed the Spend Cap for one line.
The confusion contributed to bill shock, increased contact centre demand and declining DCSAT, creating both a customer problem and an operational cost for the business.
Three problems to solve:
🔁
01: More lines = more work
Managing another number meant leaving Spend Cap, switching lines and repeating the same journey. This becomes tedious the bigger the account.
🤔
02: Ambiguity
Customers couldn't tell which number they were managing. The active number wasn't shown, so it was easily assumed the setting was for the entire account.
🔍
03: Difficult to discover
The experience was buried within Settings, making an important financial protection feature harder to find and manage.
THE mvp
The immediate solution seemed obvious: make it clear which number a customer was managing and allow them to switch without leaving Spend Cap. For our first release, I introduced a number picker directly into the existing experience.
It was a quick win, customers could finally switch between numbers without starting the journey again. But easier switching wasn't enough.
The picker still relied on customers managing each Spend Cap individually and became tedious as the number of lines increased. This MVP went live, and we began to rethink the entire experience altogether.
THE REDESIGN
Designing for clarity, control & confidence
I redesigned the experience around how multi-line customers actually managed Spend Cap, making account status clearer, supporting individual and collective control, and introducing guidance at the point customers needed it.
Three problems to solve:
✅
01: See protection at a glace
Names, avatars and visible Spend Cap status made it easier to understand who was protected and by how much.
👥
02: Manage one or all
Customers could change an individual Spend Cap or apply the same protection across multiple lines, without repeating the journey.
📍
03: Bring Spend Cap into Manage
Moving the experience closer to other account-management actions made an important financial control easier to discover.
Designing the interaction around customer intent
01: CONTEXTUAL GUIDANCE
Using progressive disclosure to ask about travel intent allows us to recommend & pre-populate a £20 Spend Cap (based on typical roaming costs), to provide a useful buffer while keeping the final amount in their control.
I later expanded this principle within the Roaming experience.
02: CLARITY & CONTROL
Using visibility of the status & account, there's reduced reliance on memory and makes it clear who & what is being changed.
Customers retain control through the toggle and stepper, while inclusions and exclusions are available contextually.
03: CONFIRMATION
I added positive feedback that their change has been applied and addresses the ambiguity from the legacy experience.
The tick animation adds a small moment of delight while reinforcing that the action was successful.
IMPACT
& Metrics
The final experience improved completion and customer satisfaction while reducing support demand.
The work also contributed to our wider design system, introducing accessible navigation patterns aligned to WCAG 2.2 that could be reused beyond Spend Cap.
1.23 to 1.98
61% DCSAT increase
(Digital
Customer
Satisfaction)
📈
🫂
WCAG 2.2
Design System contribution
Reduced
Support Demand
⬇️
✅
Completion increased from
50% to 72%