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ClientAirband Wireless
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Website
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RoleLead Product Designer (UX, UI)
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Year2023
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Timeline4 weeks
Introduction
When Airband approached this project, the ambition was clear: create their first ever mobile self-care experience and redefine how customers interact with their broadband services. There was no existing app, no digital foundation to inherit, and no design system to build upon. Every part of the experience needed to be created from the ground up.
As Lead Product Designer, I guided the entire journey, from research and modelling to flow architecture, interface design, accessibility, and cross-team alignment. This was a true zero-to-one challenge, and my aim was to produce a product that felt calm, clear, and genuinely helpful.
Understanding the Landscape
Before thinking about features or UI, I immersed myself in the realities of how customers currently managed their broadband. Across interviews, customer-support transcripts, and field insights, one pattern stood out:
the experience was fragmented across multiple channels, and none of them felt intuitive.
People weren’t looking for bells and whistles, they wanted:
- Straightforward plan management
- Clarity around billing and consumption
- Faster ways to resolve issues
- One reliable place to do everything
This formed the foundation of the entire product direction.
SWOT Analysis
Defining the Strategic Context
To design the product responsibly, I needed to understand not just the user’s pain points, but the broader ecosystem Airband operates in. The SWOT analysis helped crystallise the opportunities and constraints that would shape the product.
Fig: SWOT Analysis
Competitive Feature Analysis
Mapping the Market Gap
Because Airband had never offered a self-care product before, it was crucial to understand what customers already experienced in the market, and where the gaps were.
I conducted a competitive analysis across three widely used ISPs (Spectranet, Cyberspace LTE, and FibreOne) to uncover strengths, shortcomings, and opportunities for differentiation.
The goal wasn’t to replicate existing features, but to identify how Airband could offer a more thoughtful, mobile-first experience that solved frustrations users consistently raised during research.
Feature Comparison Matrix
The matrix below captures how well competitors support core self-care features, and how Airband’s envisioned experience improves upon them. This exercise helped validate prioritisation, sharpen user flows, and ensure the product meaningfully exceeded customer expectations.
Fig: Comparison Matrix
Key Insights from Competitor Benchmarking
1. The market lacks a truly coherent mobile experience
Most providers offer self-care features, but the delivery is inconsistent. Apps tend to feel retrofitted, with outdated interfaces and complex journeys that require too many steps.
2. Transparency is a recurring pain point
Users repeatedly expressed frustration around unclear billing structures, scattered consumption information, and unpredictable renewal reminders. Competitors offered fragments of this, but nothing cohesive.
3. Support is rarely integrated
Two out of three competitors still rely heavily on offline support or external channels, creating friction at moments when users are most vulnerable.
4. Real-time communication is noticeably absent
Service updates, outages, plan expiry notifications, and usage thresholds are rarely communicated proactively, even though this is one of the greatest needs among broadband users.
How Airband Intentionally Differentiates
The competitive analysis made Airband’s opportunity crystal clear:
- Build a complete, mobile-first self-care platform instead of patchwork tools.
- Provide clear consumption history, not just data balances.
- Integrate support directly inside the app, reducing reliance on call lines.
- Offer proactive notifications that prevent surprises rather than respond to them.
- Streamline renewals and plan changes so customers can complete tasks in seconds.
- Digitalise service relocation; one of the biggest friction points among existing providers.
By using this matrix early in the process, I was able to make informed decisions about what to prioritise in the design and how to elevate the experience beyond established norms.
User Personas
Designing for Real People
Because Airband had never offered a self-care experience before, understanding the people behind the connection became essential. I needed to know who we were designing for, what they were trying to achieve, and why the existing journey felt so frustrating.
Through customer interviews, support logs, and insights from installation teams, three core personas emerged. They weren’t abstract archetypes, they represented genuine behaviours, needs, and motivations observed across Airband’s user base.
These personas became the backbone of the product strategy, guiding decisions around navigation, information hierarchy, tone of voice, and feature prioritisation.
How These Personas Shaped the Product
These three personas helped answer crucial questions early in the design process:
- What should be visible the moment a user logs in?
- Which tasks deserve the shortest paths?
- What level of detail is helpful vs. overwhelming?
- How do we design for people who rely heavily on connectivity, but aren’t necessarily tech experts?
They ultimately shaped the four foundational pillars of the Airband Self-Care experience: clarity, control, transparency, and support. Every design decision, from navigation to copy choice, can be traced back to the needs expressed by Habeeb, Ada, and Kunle.
Designing the User Flows
From Zero Structure to a Clear System
Because no digital foundation existed, I architected the entire experience from scratch. This meant defining:
- How users enter the experience
- How tasks are grouped
- How flows progress
- How the system should “feel”
Starting with real user intentions
The four most common tasks shaped the navigation:
1. Plans
2. Bills
3. Account
4. Support
Principles driving the flows
- One purpose per screen
- No unnecessary detours
- Predictable paths
- Clear information hierarchy
Designing the Interface
With the flows in place, I moved into UI design, again starting from zero. There was no existing design system, no inherited palette, no established interaction rules..
My design direction prioritised:
- Calmness: broadband is stressful enough; the interface shouldn’t be.
- Hierarchy: clear pathways for the most common tasks.
- Breathing room: reducing information density to support comprehension.
- Scalability: a component system that could evolve with future expansion.
I designed every screen from scratch.
1. Onboarding & login
Fig: Dark Mode
Fig: Light Mode
2. Renew plan
Fig: Dark Mode
Fig: Light Mode
3. Change plan
Fig: Dark Mode
Fig: Light Mode
4. Pay Bill
Fig: Dark Mode
Fig: Light Mode
5. Add Money
Fig: Dark Mode
Fig: Light Mode
Each screen went through multiple iterations based on user feedback and feasibility discussions with engineering.
Accessibility from Day One
Because this was a zero-to-one product, accessibility was embedded at the foundation rather than retrofitted.
Using BrowserStack's Accessibility Toolkit, I validated:
- Text contrast in light & dark modes
- Touch target sizing
- UI hierarchy
- Focus order
- Alternative text
- Cross-theme readability
The Explore screens passed 75 checks with zero issues, confirming compliance with WCAG guidelines. I manually adjusted icon weights, spacing, and colour balance to ensure clarity, especially for users with low vision or older devices.
Outcome
By designing Airband Self-Care from scratch, we achieved:
- A unified, modern, mobile-first broadband experience
- Dramatically simpler task completion paths
- Clearer service visibility and billing transparency
- Reduced customer confusion and support dependency
- A foundational UX structure that the business can scale for years
The design created a much clearer, more confident relationship between customers and their connectivity, which was the core goal from the start.
Reflections
Designing a product from scratch is always an exercise in discipline. With no legacy structure to lean on, every decision had to be intentional. This project affirmed the power of grounding design in real human needs, not assumptions. It showed how clarity, simplicity, and transparency can transform an industry experience that customers have long accepted as complicated.
The result is more than an app, it’s Airband’s first true step into digital self-care.
