Building a Seamless “Add a Line” Experience
for T-Life
How I helped transform a high-friction eCommerce process into a customer-first experience that improved conversions and reduced support calls.
The Challenge:
Simplifying a Critical Customer Journey
One of the biggest opportunities was improving the Add a Line process—a high-traffic, high-stakes journey that directly impacted revenue and customer satisfaction. At the time, the experience was fragmented: unclear eligibility rules, confusing steps, and inconsistent flows across platforms. Customers often dropped off midway, and internal teams struggled to align on priorities.
We needed a way to simplify, clarify, and unify this journey, while balancing business goals, technical feasibility, and most importantly, customer trust.
The opportunity involves redesigning this flow natively and scaling it to support additional product types - phones, tablets, smartwatches, hotspots, and IoT - while improving conversion.
My role: Product Design Manager
Team: 2 Designers, 2 Product Managers, 1 UX Researcher, 7 Engineers, 3 DBMs
Timeline: Multi-phase rollout over 7 months
Goal: Simplify customer self-service experiences, reduce care calls, and improve digital conversion.
The Approach:
Collaboration First
This wasn’t a design problem alone. Success required pulling in product managers, engineers, marketing, operations, and care teams. I led collaborative workshops where we mapped the end-to-end journey, identified pain points, and prioritized what mattered most. These sessions weren’t just about sticky notes on walls—they were about building shared ownership.
Through active collaboration, we clarified a central goal: make “Add a Line” as intuitive as buying something in just a few clicks, while meeting the business need to capture upsell opportunities.
Defining the Business Objectives
Before we jumped into pixels, I worked with stakeholders to ground the team in key business objectives:
Increase conversion rates by reducing drop-offs.
Improve transparency for customers about costs, eligibility, and timelines.
Enable scalability so the same design patterns could support future offers.
By anchoring every design decision in these objectives, we could balance customer empathy with measurable business impact.
Smartphones & Tablets
Introduced full native flow for additional devices in February 2025. Exposed complete rate plan options resulting in 64% lift in conversion and over 100,000 new orders.
Payment
Integration
Enabled stored payment method selection during AAL in April 2025. This strategic enhancement achieved 75% conversion rate for users with stored payment methods.
Laying the
Foundation
Launched native Add-a-Voice line with phone purchases in December 2024. Established baseline experience for comparison, enabling end-to-end native AAL experience for phones.
Balancing Feedback and Leadership Buy-In
“We built confidence through clarity — every critique became a step toward alignment.”
Design reviews were essential to sharpening our solutions. I encouraged a feedback culture that allowed for critique without defensiveness. Internally, I coached junior designers on how to frame their work against business goals. Externally, I presented to leadership, focusing on storytelling, showing the customer’s perspective first, then connecting it to how the proposed solution advanced business needs.
This balance of constructive critique and executive communication kept the project moving forward with confidence and clarity.
From Vision to Execution
Once aligned, I guided the team through rapid prototyping and usability testing, validating flows with real customers. Insights revealed small but critical friction points (like unclear pricing language) that we addressed before final build. I partnered closely with engineering to ensure that the integrity of the design was preserved through launch.
Building a high-performing, scalable funnel that added real business value. A streamlined Add-a-Line journey that reduced drop-offs, increased conversions, and received positive feedback from both customers and internal teams.
The Results:
Our native experience now supports diverse product types including voice lines, smartwatches, tablets, hotspots, and IoT devices with significantly improved performance metrics.
We've achieved a 64% lift in conversion, processed over 100,000 new orders through T-Life, and increased conversion rates from 12.7% to nearly 20%.
The implementation of T-Mobile Wallet has driven a 75% conversion rate for users utilizing stored payment methods, which now account for nearly 30% of all orders.
The experience my team built has demonstrated both exceptional extensibility and efficiency by maintaining robust conversion rates across diverse audiences. This success is particularly evident among TFB Micro business users, who represent one of our newest market segments.
This collaborative effort has transformed a once web-wrapped, clunky experience into a high-performing, scalable funnel that delivers real business value across both consumer and business audiences.
Cart-to-order conversion improved significantly
+55% lift in conversion rates
through phased feature releases.
Expanded across consumer and business segments
Reflection
The Five Attributes That Drove Success
Strategic Business Understanding
Design needs to be brought in earlier to be grounded in the business objectives
Executive
Communication
My storytelling is what helped drive the design vision to customer impact
Feedback
Culture
Design critiques with often and early for constructive growth
End-to-End Execution
From ideation to launch, consistency was throughout the work the entire time
Collaboration & Stakeholder Alignment
This is about building trust and ownership across teams.
The Add-a-Line redesign became more than a flow improvement, it became a model for how T-Life aligns around customer value. It shows how design leadership can bridge clarity, empathy, and execution to create real business impact.
It remains one of my proudest examples of how design leadership can shape both customer journeys and organizational impact.
Retrospective
For me, this journey wasn't just about polishing products, it was about weaving teams together, crafting with purpose, and transforming rough edges into smooth passages.
Truth be told, our path has had its challenges. Shifting timelines, incomplete handoffs, and isolated conversations unfold while I balance multiple priorities. Our design process breaks from tradition, and I've mastered the art of timely interventions. At the heart of this beautiful chaos stands collaboration, with me serving as its vital center.
This experience is performing…and performing well.
But the story continues to evolve. Like any treasured creation, it grows alongside our users, responds to our data, and reaches toward our boldest aspirations.
The journey stretches forward as my team prepares to deliver Multiline Mixed Transactions in 11.3, enabling customers to combine upgrades and new lines in a single cart.
This work has enriched T-Life’s prospect flows, giving us advantages in high-performing areas while building familiar patterns that connect different customer experiences.
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