Telenor ID — 
A global telecom authentication experience

I helped design a seamless, scalable and secure authentication experience for Telenor that reached over 70 million unique users across 8 global markets.

Senior Product Designer

• Interaction Design
• User Research
• Design System
• Accessibility
• UX Strategy

• Fragmented branding and inconsistent UX across units
• Vastly different cultural contexts and digital literacy levels
• Regular threats of sophisticated cyberattacks
• A non-scalable legacy solution (Connect ID) with high maintenance cost
• Low team morale due to recent restructuring and lack of trust from business units

My assignment was to improve the usability and security of Telenor’s global authentication solution previously called Connect ID and lead the rebranding to Telenor ID, aligning it with the corporate brand and design guidelines.

Creating one scalable and trustworthy login experience meant overcoming challenges across 8 markets: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Thailand, each with its specific user groups and business goals.

This required more than a redesign. We needed a clear strategy, tight cross-cultural collaboration, and a shift in how authentication was perceived 
— not just as tech infrastructure, but as a critical user-facing product.

• Telenor ID is a product, not a service.
• We defined the core product value proposition: one sign-in for all services.
• The value stood on three measures for success: trust, convenience and security.

User research

To establish a baseline for our product, we conducted qualitative and quantitative user user research and got a better understanding of users awareness of Telenor as a brand.

Methods used:

• User Interviews
• Contextual Interviews
• Focus Groups
• Usability Testing

Understanding users is not always an easy task. It shifts perceptions and challenges the established norms. And this precisely happened to us.

We learned that in order to ensure that users trust our solution, we needed to work simultaneously on rebranding and redesign of the whole authentication. Our tasks were now clearly defined, and we started coming up with the processes to achieve that.

Telenor ID app redesign

We jumped heads first into another round of user research, but this time it was for a whole different purpose. We wanted to discover the validity of the concepts for our application. While during branding we were mostly concerned with the users perception of trust, the prototypes for the actual authentication flows were the flagships for increasing the security and usability of Telenor ID.

Sketching and prototyping

We tested different concepts we sketched together in a sprint workshop activity with other team members. We experimented with content strategy and information architecture in order to get the categorisation right, and by “right” we meant the one that users in all markets will have an easy time understanding and recalling. This involved working with translation, style and tone of voice. This was a great opportunity to re-inform our research goals with the research results done from previous research.

User research

• Concept Testing
• Card Sorting
• Information Architecture
• Surveys
• User Interviews
• Support Analytics

User flows

Adding the functional logic to our flows that must support security level of assurance 4, while maintaining the ease of use, quickly became a project in itself. With hundreds of variations of the flows from different business units containing different apps and services that all authenticate through Telenor ID meant we needed to choose wisely which flows to focus on. 

We had 20 million users to analyse data from, and discovered patterns of behaviour impossible to see in smaller user databases.

How would you design a secure authentication experience if a single user living in a remote village managed accounts of dozens of other villagers, most of them digitally illiterate and using cheap cell phones?

Interaction and user interface design

From users of Telenor Norway who regularly use the newest iPhones with resolution i.e. 1242 × 2688 to users of Bangladesh that might use older Nokia (yes, Nokia!) phone with resolution of 320 × 480, there was a lot of technical requirements we need to cover when making the screens, including QA.

We used Sketch, Figma, and even native interaction design prototyping apps such as Principle and Flinto, and of course HTML/CSS, to design screens and interactions. We designed for those that can support a more advanced features, but also ensured that there is graceful degradation for older phones and systems.

• Scaled from 12 million to over 70 million users in under 3 years
• Increased user trust, security, and brand consistency globally
• Successfully implemented LoA4 assurance level and GDPR compliance
• Reduced maintenance costs by standardising and streamlining design components through a design system
• Rebuilt trust between the core team and business units
• Increased UX maturity and design awareness across the organisation

• Design is strategy. Shape it from day one.
• Even small, motivated teams can lead massive change.
• You don’t need more research, just the right research.
• Working globally means embracing other cultures.
• Remote work can’t always replace in-person connection. Travel matters.
• Design craft has impact. Especially on a 100KB performance budget!
• Neither engineering nor design craft alone can guarantee good UX. Only great collaboration can.

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