03
Rebtel
Client
In-House
Year
2016
Role
Product Design
Credits
Vinh Kha, Andrew Bennett, Rickard Roslund, Pär Lindhe, Alexander Auld & the whole Rebtel Team
Global migration is a 21st-century reality: Whether people are fleeing from something or racing towards better opportunity, cultures are now living side by side in a new way. Rebtel, is about tearing down borders – both the geographical borders that complicate international communication and the cultural borders that keep people divided. Rebtel started with communications and international calling to connect all migrants with their friends and family worldwide.
Rebtel is on a mission to liberate international calling.
What does Rebtel offer?Rebtel is an app based calling service allowing users to call anywhere using normal phone lines at a low price.
Who is the user?Cubans in Miami, Indians in England & Nigerians in England. These people of immigrants and have family left in their home country. When they call home, they usually call their family, and they speak for about 20-30 minutes per call.
These people usually either use phone cards which is generally a little more expensive, or they call through the internet (Skype, WhatsApp, messenger, etc.). Problem is that internet in Cuba, Nigeria and some parts of India is, or at least was at that time, quite bad, if it even existed.
These people are young, affluent immigrants who aren't afraid to speak up.
What are we trying to solve?How might we create a focused, seamless & delightful calling experience?
What we didSubscriptions, Credits & Rebel CallingRebtel offers 3 ways of making calls, the user either buys credits that can be used to call any country, a subscription to a specific country or if the recipient also has Rebtel then they can call each other unlimited for $1/month through Rebel Calling.
Recent listWe knew from our data that the majority of our users only call 3 people. Therefore we made the recent calls list was our main point of the app, every time you open the app you land there. We made each entry on the recent list bigger so that when a user had 3 entries, it filled app the whole screen.
Since people are calling across different time zones we decided to show the local time of the one you are about to call so that users don't have to worry that they are calling at a bad time or so they don't have to think or look up what time it is at the receiver's location.
We also wanted to show the number of minutes a user has left to call to each specific contact so that they know how long they can expect the call to be before they run out of minutes. This is, of course, dependent on which user they call and if they have credits, subscription or if the recipient also has Rebtel.
Rebel callingIf a contact also has Rebtel calling through rebel calling can be easily reached through swiping left on the contact card. The contact card will then transform into rebel calling mode. Group calls are also available through rebel calling.
Making a callThere are two types of calls that can be made. Rebel call and regular call. The red indicates that a Rebel call is being made, and the white that it is a regular call.
Finding contactsIf a user wants to call someone else than contacts in their recent list, they can just swipe down on the recent list, and a search field will appear. They can also go to the address book which stores all the contacts. The address book is split into two categories; All contacts & other Rebtel users so that the user can see who they can make free calls to. Or they can simply use the traditional dial pad.
The Rebtel app exists in both iOS and Andriod.
My role:I was part of working with UX (creating user flows & wireframes) as well as the UI (Design production & prototyping) as well as hand-over to development & QA. I also did User-testing and was part of defining what to test and track.
What did I learned?I worked in-house with all disciplines of product design over a long period of time, and I learned what it means to grow with a product, to understand the users, what is important to them and to understand how to create value for them. I learned through designing, testing and failing, iterating, tracking and talking to users. Rebtel taught me the foundation which made me the product designer I am today.
