Hasta La Ideas

Paris-based service design company User Studio recently shared a concept for the seemingly impossibly task of designing a beautiful and useful phone bill, the Refact.

After analyzing 18 months worth of phone bill data, the designers worked to cull information that users would actually want to know including total phone usage, number of calls, most called numbers and longest calls. What sets Refact apart from other data visualization options is the online service concept that allows users to easily input the data from their standard-issue phone bill, interact with the resulting information and track usage trends over time. As Matthieu Savary, co-founder of User Studio explains:

There are a lot of situations where we, the users of digital services, find ourselves in front of endless lists of numbers, arrays of meaningless data… especially when it’s time to pay for something! At User Studio, as typical users of a lot of these modern services, we find these situations highly frustrating, especially when we know that the service providers probably use this data—that we, as users, helped produce—to better sell their products.

So we set off to try and find a way to dig up the data that lies in the bills of one of those services that we use all the time: our mobile phone subscriptions. We knew no public API existed… but we had hope that data could be extracted from the PDF bills that the providers are now making available on web platforms (to avoid sending invoices via snail mail).

Phone bills are often considered by mobile operators as something they legally have to provide their customers with. Bills are rarely thought of as a potential part of a much larger and much more compelling user experience (ie. they’re rarely designed with the same care as the provider’s web site, store, customized phone os, in-house apps, etc.)

Refact (EN) from User Studio on Vimeo.

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