Broadband utility

Project overview

To integrate with multiple manufacturers and experience to manage Three customer broadband devices. Offering set-up, support and customisation of the users home network. Features like troubleshooting on first startup, login and factory reset, in addition to password and network renaming. A future feature would be to add a comprehensive signal tracker that allows the user to get the best signal form the router, so ensure the UI can facilitate more features making it scalable.   Design with the core Three brand’s identity creating a versitile design that will be scalable as new hardware becomes available. This will replace the current third party managed apps that we offer today, bringing these utility into the main Three app.

Timeframe

My role

Tools

2022
12 weeks

UI Design, Assist the UX Designer, Prototyping, Stakeholder management, Digital asset creation, Animation

Blender 3D, After effects, Sketch, Adobe Creative Cloud, Teams

Goal

Design and experience to bring a broadband utility experience to life in the Three app.

The reliance on third party managed apps for home broadband means an inconsistent experience that doesn’t meet the business’ needs. The experiences while simple, do not reflect the brand or meet the standard customers should expect from Three.   An end-to-end experience that is versatile enough to be able to support multiple different routers, their hardware and support. Look visually aligned with the brand, offer more self-serve functions to reduce contact centre support requests and leverage more from the hardware. Giving an experience that customers are able to use easily and ultimately want them to choose us when they look to upgrade at the end of their term.

Support across 2 manufacturers to start, ZTE and Zyxel. This is for Three business and Three consumer useage.

Research what experience our current customers have, which of the third party apps we currently offer are a good experience and which common features do both routers have that we can offer and MVP solution, or have somewhere to start development. The development will begin when we have an MVP, with additional functionality being designed and made available in later development sprints.   Look at brands that offer similar experiences, brands like Google Wi-Fi, EE, Virgin media O2. See how those experiences differ from our third party offering, and where they fall short of our vision for the project.

Map a simple experience to on-board/set-up the two broadband devices, visually find a way to demonstrate interactions and investigation of the hardware for the customer to self serve and self diagnose issues. Plan the features to support renaming the wi-fi, resetting and setting up passwords or additional security. Reseting the device and diagnosing troubleshooting. Showing the status of the router, current performance and steps for optimising signal, performance and speeds.

Process

Iteration

As we work with the manufactures from a development spike in parallel to our design, new information wil come available about how things need to work with regards to the hardware and interfacing with the hardware. We can equally request deeper integrations through API’s. During the project we were able to leverage new api’s getting access to features that the manufacturer themselves had not yet integrated into their mobile applications. It’s worth saying that all functionality is available via a web ip address, where more tech savvy users would be able to configure complex functions into their routers and home network. These are not user friendly and offer little to no accessibility for users without an advanced background in router hardware management.

  From a UI standpoint, line illustrations for the routers were abstract and few, offering little confidence that these would be the way to communicate to our users how to interface physically with the device. They would also be inaccurate, often depicting similar routers but not the exact model, relying on text steps to eject the sim for example.  

I looked to source 3d models from the manufacturers however they were often unfinished and simple, also in formats that i could not work with in the software I had, and often incompatible showing wrong materials or broken textures making them unusable. My experience with 3d modeling meant I wanted to create my own models, this would give the flexibility and versatility that we needed. Using blender and Adobe Dimension, I was able to create accurate scale models of the routers, in addition to environments to help assist the router set up and support.

My experience with 3d modeling meant I wanted to create my own models, this would give the flexibility and versatility that we needed.

Creating energy labels and more complex parts like vents and ports that weren’t necessary in 3D as textures in photoshop allowed for swapping as newer models or variations are added, few shots would need to be re-rendered if the model changed making them versatile.

High fidelity designs

+20%

increased HBB dashboard visits from Q1 25 to Q4 25, with Q4 recording over half a million visits to the Broadband App

198M

contributing digital visits, roughly 7 every second, every day, all year round

6

routers are now live across 4 manufacturers

The result is an app that gives us full control over the experience, contact centre guides can be consolidated as experiences are consistent over several routers. The reliance on third part developers working with the manufacturers means we can iterate and improve and react to new issues that arise with regards to the hardware and the experience.   

We now support 6 routers over 4 manufacturers, no one else is doing this as far as we have been able to find. Each router can bring it’s unique capabilities, the GreenPacket indoor router has a motorized calibration, that requires a unique guide step and status for the user. This increases performance and speeds, and yet more accessible to more users as we present this calibration trigger in the app.  

The advantages go beyond the hardware, as users have the core app installed, we get them into the ecosystem for upgrades and offers and promotions. This experience is one we are most proud of as it showcases several examples of individuals in the team bringing their unique experiences into the project.

Feature-level engagement also showed strong growth:

Configure Wi-Fi (frequency, Wi-Fi name, password): 14k visits per month, up 58% vs. Q1 2025
Connected Device Controls (view, pause, or block connected devices): 16k visits per month, up 72%
Hub Positioning Information: 11k visits per month, up 61%
Diagnostics (information, restart, factory reset): 8k visits per month, up 48%
Set Admin Password: 3k visits per month, down 34%
Share Passcode: 8.3k visits per month, up 87%
Light Settings (turn off, schedule, or enable router lights): 5.3k visits per month, up 52%
About (router information): 4.5k visits per month, up 39%

Usage shifting month on month between the routers as new models get brought to the market and to the app.

+50%

Visits from users identifying as having HBB rose by 50% over the same period, reaching just under 300k in Q4 2025.

5.2M

this contributes to our 5.2million active My3 registered customers. +8% on 2025.