For Boost, the senior designer and I got to work closely with a woman who’d just joined the company from Rush Card, which had a very similar target audience. She helped us refine the messaging and design to maximize response.

According to her, control and customization were big. Prepaid customers like going with prepaid services because they can tweak it to their liking. Without contracts they’re free to start and stop service when they want. So a lot of the messaging is around control and choice. Why go with prepaid? Because it’s a phone plan on your terms.

The other big thing was the stigma that prepaid phone companies have crappy phones. Not Boost. Many of the top selling Android phones and even the newest iPhone are compatible and available (you’ll notice there’s no iPhone messaging here--we had a very short turn around on this and had to launch before messaging approval from Apple came back. We added it in later). So we put the top-of-the-line phones front and center and frequently reminded the user with lines like “The phones you want are here.”