The Mission
Cox Communications is a leading US telecommunications provider, serving over 6 million residential and business customers within a high-scale service ecosystem.
The ask was to redesign their "Communication Preferences" because, honestly, they were a bit of a maze.f
The Goal:
Help users manage their alerts without needing a map and a compass.
The Squad & My Role
They say it takes a village, and this squad was a powerhouse. I worked alongside a Creative Director, Lead UX, Senior UI Designer, a dedicated Researcher, and a Copywriter, all supported by our Product and Project Management partners.
As a UX Designer, I was involved from the first "why" to the final "how." My contributions included:
Strategic Audit: Contributing to the heuristics evaluation and competitive analysis to identify where the experience was lagging behind the industry.
Execution & Logic: Crafting high-fidelity wireframes that prioritized clarity and ease of use.
Validation: Building the interactive prototypes used in testing to settle the "Category vs. Channel" debate with real user data.The Why: When people can't find their billing or outage alerts, they call support. Reducing those calls makes everyone, especially the customers, a lot happier.
Impact
100%
Task Success Rate
35%
Reduction in Time-on-Task
0
Interaction Errors
Strategic Discovery: Playing UX Detective
We started with a heuristic evaluation to see where the friction was hiding. I focused on three big pillars: Guidance, Clarity, and Control. One of the biggest takeaways? We needed to stop "surprising" users. Whether it was setting a password or choosing an email frequency, people just wanted to know what was expected of each step. Empathy in design often starts with just being really, really clear.
The Great Showdown: Category vs. Channel
Early on, our team hit a classic "Design Dilemma." Should users manage their notifications by Channel (Email, SMS, Phone) or by Category (Billing, Security, Outages)?
This was a big deal for the business. To settle the debate, we built high-fidelity prototypes for both options. It wasn't about who was "right", it was about seeing which world made the most sense to a human being trying to pay their bill on a Tuesday morning.
The Lab: Reality Testing with 10 Humans
The team put the prototypes to a 10-person stress test. Watching real users interact with our "perfect" logic is the ultimate reality check; here’s how the squad narrowed the signal from the noise:
The 50/50 Split: Testing was a dead heat between Channel and Topic. The team chose Category-based organization for long-term scalability, focusing on the value of the message over the delivery method.
Clarity > Poetry: Swapped "Quieter Messaging" for "Fewer Notifications." Directness is the highest form of empathy; no one wants a "poetic" notification settings page.
Expectation Met: Users instinctively looked for "Account Settings" under "My Account." We put it exactly where they expected it. No need to over-engineer the obvious.
Execution: Designing for the Real World
Since most of us check our phones while we're doing five other things, I focused heavily on a mobile-first approach. Working alongside our Senior UI Designer, I made sure our wireframes were "thumb-friendly" and consistent with the Cox Design System. I then architected the desktop version, ensuring those "Control Drawers" scaled beautifully on larger screens. We also made sure the architecture was ready for a future "Multi-User" feature, because households are complicated, and our design shouldn't be.
Impact & Outcomes
The redesign transitioned the Cox Preference Center from a fragmented maze into a streamlined, user-first tool. By the final round of stakeholder presentations and usability validation, we achieved several key performance benchmarks:
100% Task Success Rate: Every participant successfully located and updated their "Account Settings" on the first attempt. This confirmed that our Information Architecture wasn't just logical—it was invisible, aligning perfectly with user mental models.
35% Efficiency Gain in Navigation: By pivoting to a Category-based approach, we eliminated "navigational pogo-sticking." Users moved through the flow with significantly higher velocity, finding their target settings faster than in any previous version of the legacy system.
Zero Interaction Errors: We solved a major friction point regarding mandatory notifications. By pairing "Required" tags with locked toggles, we clearly signaled system constraints, successfully eliminating the "dead-end" clicks and user frustration identified in earlier research.
Engineering Confidence Beyond the user metrics, my delivery of high-fidelity, documented wireframes served as a final "source of truth," reducing design-to-dev friction and ensuring a high-fidelity implementation of the new notification logic.
Reflection
Designing for 6 million users taught me that empathy in UX is often found in the "boring" details, like clear instructional copy and predictable navigation. While it’s tempting to over-engineer solutions, the Cox project proved that the most sophisticated design is often the one that gets out of the user's way the fastest.
