A telco that makes things easy. Welcome to simplicity
Deliverables
Logo Design
Design System
Style Guide
Tone of Voice
Experience Design
Product Design
Mobily is Saudi Arabia's second largest telecommunications provider, with a broad and range of products and services.
Our initial project was focused on Mobily's digital video-on-demand platform – mView.
We had been referred to the VP of Digital Services through a mutual acquaintance, as experts in brand and product design.
Facing the looming threat of powerful international brands entering the Saudi market, Mobily decided to use a short window of opportunity to revise and refresh the mView brand and product design.
"Creativity and innovation as intrinsic foundational brand components"
Entertainment anywhere
We started with revising the entire brand strategy and architecture.
The key differentiator of mView from other regional competitors was that it although it had a dedicated set-top box, as a SaaS platform it was essentially accessible from anywhere, on any device with an internet connection.
We built a brand strategy around convenient connectivity; the ability to enjoy live and pre-recorded tv show, movies, music, and other digital content either at home or on the go – 'entertainment anywhere' became the value proposition, with accessible, proactive, and creative forming the core values that guide decision-making and action.
This foundation would be the driving force behind the new visual identity, product and industrial design philosophy, and content strategy – a vision for mView that competitors in the region would find difficult to match or replicate.
Infinite possibilities
Leveraging the core brand values, we experimented with the concept of a pathway leading Users on a journey – we liked the idea that mView is much more than a 'lean back' experience, that the breath and depth of the platform leads you forward to new and undiscovered things.
The result was a brand mark consisting of the MV initials rendered as a single curved line, with a soft shadow denoting the separation between the M and the V, enclosed in a circle that denotes the 'infinite' nature of the platform.
We also added a wordmark to cultivate familiarity more swiftly, with the long-term plan to eventually drop it in favour of the symbol on its own.
Flexible foundation
For mView's design system, we made the circle a core graphical element that could be utilised in a number of different ways, providing a flexible foundation for use across any number of brand applications.
For typography we opted for a rounded sans serif (Rubrik) that lent applications a bold but affable tone in keeping with the brand personality. Headlines and titles were all lowercase - a nod to the (primary) Arabic language that has no capitalisation, and we instead used font weights to denote the typographic hierarchy.
For layout composition, we created a combined grid for print, packaging, and on-screen applications (with the exception of the mView App) that illustrated how various asset could be arranged.
Industrial-strength design
Product and industrial design isn't something normally done in-house at a telco – we changed that.
We helped put together an internal design team at Mobily to create and manage the mView brand and content, including product and industrial designers.
We designed the new mView set-top box as a functional yet stylish product, with a modern and intuitive UX/UI to match.
Brand new
One of the challenges any successful business faces is not falling victim to complacency.
For more than a decade, Mobily had ridden a wave of popularity driven by product and service innovation, but that had slowly dwindled in recent years as the company gloated on past successes and became bloated and sluggish.
To address this, Mobily were putting together a shortlist of agencies to take on their first rebrand in more than a decade, however as we had already proven with mView that it could be done in-house, we were offered the project.
Having accepted, we spent the next year and a half with the customer relations team gathering data, the product teams with their roadmaps, the marketing teams and their strategies, finance for their forecasts, HR for everything internal, and the CEO and Board for the business strategy over the short and long term.
What materialised at the end was the Mobily Brand Experience Framework - mBRACE - a new foundation for the comprehensive and systematic overhaul of the entire brand.
mBRACE consisted of four core pillars; brand strategy, identity, management, and experience, supported by a series of actions and activities that together provided a new, more human and more emotive brand experience.
Welcome to simplicity
The strategy behind mBRACE was simplicity; strip away the superfluous and and focus on making our customers and employees lives easier. Taking things back to basics, and rebuilding trust through a trimmed down product and service lines that delivered true value, and enabling our staff to be more collaborative and efficient through an Agile approach to their work.
We developed a segmentation model that allowed us to precisely map product and service features to individual user needs, around which we could then carefully craft an appropriate experience, making them richer but more relevant.
Clean up operation
We overhauled the visual identity, starting with reducing the logo to just it's symbol (already a potent and recognised brand identifier).
We replaced the sprawling typographic system with a single custom typeface containing a bilingual character set, and new typographic hierarchy, making it more consistent and less confusing.
A minimised the colour palette, created scalable layout grid, new UI stencils for more thoughtful and intuitive digital applications, a human-centric interior and exterior retail design including empowering new tools for automation and self-service,, a tone of voice and messaging platform that was simpler, more informative and direct, and far less technical, and reduced waste in packaging, making it more re-usable and recyclable.
We replaced the existing web portal with a more feature-rich and intuitive site more relevant to both consumer and enterprise customers, wrapped in a unified UI design that extended across all digital products and services, making them more familiar and accessible.
