STC شركة الاتصالات السعودية (Saudi Telecome company)
The Saudi Telecom Company (stc; Arabic: شركة الاتصالات السعودية), trading as STC Group, provides ICT services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, across the Middle East and Europe. The group offers landline and fixed infrastructure, mobile and data services, and broadband & cloud computing services. It also offers online payments, telecommunications, IOT, 5G, e-gaming, cybersecurity, digital entertainment, and fintech.
Overview - mystc app
mySTC is Saudi Telecom’s flagship digital platform, used by millions of customers to manage mobile plans, pay bills, recharge lines, purchase devices, access rewards (Qitaf), and explore new digital services. As STC evolved beyond a traditional telecom provider into a digital services ecosystem, the app became a critical business touchpoint-directly impacting revenue, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency. However, the existing experience was struggling to keep up with this growth.
The Problem
While the mySTC app received visual refreshes almost every year, the underlying experience had not been re-architected to support STC’s expanding business needs.
What was broken
• Core journeys (Pay Bill, Recharge, Change Package, Product Purchase) had multiple entry points, inconsistent logic, and long, fragmented flows
• Users struggled to understand where to start and how to complete tasks, especially across prepaid, postpaid, and data SIMs
• Discoverability relied heavily on user memory rather than clear system structure
• UX patterns varied across mobile, web, tablet, watch, and kiosk experiences
Why it couldn’t scale anymore
• New services were being added on top of an already complex structure, increasing UX debt
• Every feature launch required custom design solutions, slowing down delivery
• Inconsistencies across platforms made it difficult to maintain a unified STC experience
• Business teams needed faster experimentation, but the product was becoming harder to evolve safely
Who this impacted
Users
• Increased cognitive load for routine tasks
• Higher drop-offs for critical flows like Change Package and Pay Bill
• Reduced confidence when managing multiple lines or SIMs
Business
• Slower rollout of new offerings and partnerships
• Higher dependency on support channels for basic actions
• Missed opportunities to drive adoption of high-value digital services
Goals & Success Criteria
While the mySTC app received visual refreshes almost every year, the underlying experience had not been re-architected to support STC’s expanding business needs.
🎯 Product goals
• Simplify complex telecom journeys without hiding critical information
• Create a scalable experience foundation that supports future services
• Establish consistency across all platforms and form factors
🎯 User goals
• Complete key tasks quickly and confidently
• Clearly understand plans, bills, and actions across multiple SIMs
• Access rewards and purchases without friction
🏆 Business goals
• Leverage mySTC’s extensive user base and engagement to accelerate STC’s digital sales and service transformation
• By the end of next year - 2026, increase mySTC’s active users by ~15% (to ~14 million+)
• Grow the app’s share of total customer transactions from ~65% to 75%
• Boost digital revenue contribution beyond the current ~25%
Existing metrics
Month-over-month CSAT scores and top dissatisfaction drivers, revealing consistent friction points in activation, request resolution, and subscription flows. These metrics guided experience improvements with measurable business impact.
Feb 2024
87%
CSAT
50%
Unresolved requests
14%
Activation issues
18%
Recharge issues
March 2024
86%
CSAT
69%
Pending issues
14%
Unresolved problems
April 2024
87%
CSAT
25%
Pending issues
17%
Activation issues
5%
Subscription issues
The team & My role
A cross-functional team from STC and frog worked together to evolve mySTC at scale. I contributed across research, design systems, and end-to-end mobile and web design, supporting both strategic alignment and execution.
Design team
Design VP : 01
Senior Design Manager : 02
Design Team Leaders : 02
Senior Designers : 08
Program team
Program Manager Head : 01
Senior Program Managers : 02
Junior Program Manager : 01
My role
Research
User interviews and usability testing
Design system
Mobile and Web design
Project Kickoff & Strategic, Vision Alignment
The collaboration kicked off with joint workshops between STC and the frog design team to align on business goals, product constraints, and priority customer journeys. These early sessions helped establish a shared vision for evolving mySTC into a scalable, user-centric, and digitally mature platform, setting the foundation for research, design, and delivery across multiple releases.
Understanding the Old User Journey
A comprehensive breakdown of existing mySTC journeys revealed fragmented flows, duplicated steps, and inconsistent patterns across critical telecom use cases. This exercise was essential in establishing a strong baseline understanding of the app’s flows.
Understanding STC’s Service Offerings
We examined mySTC’s full range of services and configurations to understand feature depth, access rules, and variations across consumer and business accounts.
Competitor analysis
A comparative analysis was conducted across regional and global telecom apps, lifestyle app, fintech platforms, super apps, and high-usage consumer apps to understand how complex services are simplified at scale. The focus was on navigation patterns, service discoverability, transaction flows, personalisation, and visual hierarchy. This helped identify industry benchmarks, avoid known UX pitfalls, and extract reusable interaction patterns relevant to mySTC’s ecosystem.
🧠 Insights
1. Guest access reduces entry friction
2. Forced login too early causes drop-offs
3. Onboarding must educate, not overwhelm
4. Users expect multiple login options
5. Poor navigation directly impacts feature adoption
6. Search is a primary discovery tool, not a fallback
7. Frequently used actions should be instantly accessible
8. Products and services must be surfaced upfront
9. Filters and categorization are essential at scale
10. Seamless continuity improves retention
11. Personalization drives engagement and retention
12. Data-driven recommendations increase conversion
13. Status visibility builds trust
14. Telecom apps are now compared to e-commerce experiences
User interviews
We examined mySTC’s full range of services and configurations to understand feature depth, access rules, and variations across consumer and business accounts.
User interviews insights
User interviews helped uncover key pain points, usage patterns, and unmet needs across critical mySTC journeys. These insights guided design decisions by highlighting areas with the highest impact on usability, discoverability, and user trust.
Information architecture
The information architecture was restructured to simplify navigation, reduce duplication, and create a clear hierarchy across core mySTC services. This helped ensure users could easily discover key actions while supporting scalability for future features.
Building design system
A scalable design system was built to standardize UI patterns across mySTC, improve design–development alignment, and enable faster, consistent delivery across mobile and web platforms. The system focused on tokenization, reusable components, and clear governance to support continuous product evolution.
Challenges faced
Structuring variables and writing the semantics for variables
Creating zero height documents
Maintaining a design system governance model
Modifying the components according to the latest needs, changes etc
Coordinating with front end developers
Usability testing with MVP using AI ✨
Usability testing was conducted to validate key journeys, identify friction points, and ensure the redesigned experience met user expectations across critical telecom use cases.
Challenges faced
Capturing user insights in real time while users were actively performing tasks, requiring fast and accurate note-taking
Synthesizing raw observations into clear, structured, and presentation-ready insights
Managing extended testing sessions with multiple users while maintaining consistency and focus
Consolidating usability feedback and interview data collected by multiple team members into a single, unified view
Aligning cross-functional team members on required changes based on usability findings
Few screens
A snapshot of key screens from the redesigned mySTC experience, highlighting how complex telecom offerings were reorganized into clear, discoverable, and visually consistent interfaces. These screens reflect the balance between brand consistency, usability, and scalability across web and mobile.
Challenges faced
• Working under tight deadlines
• Aligning with the brand guid lines
• Updating design systems according to the needs
• Convincing stakeholders
• Matching the designs with high standard expectations
Expected Product & Business Results
The initiative aimed to improve usability, engagement, and digital adoption while reducing friction, drop-offs, and operational support costs across key mySTC journeys ensuring a faster, more consistent, and scalable experience for millions of users.
Product goals
• Reduce average task completion time for key journeys (recharge, activation, plan management) by 20–30%
• Improve task success rate across critical flows from ~70–75% → 85–90%
• Decrease user drop-offs during onboarding and first-time actions by 15–20%
• Improve feature discoverability (plans, add-ons, services) reflected through 10–15% higher feature engagement
• Reduce repeat actions caused by confusion (retries, back navigation, support taps) by 25–30%
Business metrics
• CSAT uplift:
Increase CSAT from ~86–87% → 90–92% by addressing top dissatisfaction drivers (pending issues, activation, recharge)
• Support efficiency:
Reduce pending/unresolved requests by 20–30% through clearer status visibility and self-service resolution
• Digital adoption:
Increase share of customer transactions completed via mySTC from ~65% → 75%
• Monthly active users (MAU):
Grow MAU by 10–15% year-over-year through improved onboarding, discoverability, and engagement
• Revenue impact:
Improve upsell and cross-sell conversion (plans, add-ons, devices) by 8–12%
Increase digital channel revenue contribution from ~25% → 30–35%
My learnings
This project strengthened my ability to design in a fast-paced, enterprise environment by balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints. I learned to translate complex research into actionable insights, collaborate effectively across teams, and leverage design systems and AI tools to scale usability, responsiveness, and decision-making across platforms.
• Learned the value of continuous reviews and iterative feedback loops to progressively improve product quality across releases.
• Gained hands-on experience working in a fast-paced, large-scale enterprise environment, balancing speed, quality, and stakeholder
expectations.
• Strengthened my ability to synthesize user research data into clear, actionable insights that directly informed design decisions.
• Built practical experience in leveraging AI tools for usability testing, insight extraction, and faster decision-making.
• Improved my skills in cross-team collaboration, coordination, and alignment across design, product, and program teams.
• Deepened my understanding of design system creation, governance, and documentation, including structured documentation using
Zeroheight.
• Enhanced my expertise in responsive design across mobile, web, and large-screen platforms, ensuring consistency at scale.