Transform Verizon’s digital experience from a basic billing utility into a proactive app. To ensure viability, we stress-tested a unified app concept combining Mobile, Home, Protect, and Family services—building a validated, ready-to-deploy digital asset to support Verizon’s broader shift toward a lifestyle brand.

Role & Scope; Experience Architect & Strategist (Information Architecture, Prototyping, Cross-Functional Alignment, User Validation).

Target Audience: Serving 79M+ monthly active users across single-line users and multi-member families.

THE CHALLENGE

Low Engagement: Currently, the app is viewed as a utility with low monthly engagement customers primarily use it to pay their bills. The business requires a solution that creates high-frequency, habit-forming daily engagement.

Ecosystem Complexity: Customers suffer from cognitive overload due to managing 4 different consumer apps and fragmented logins which requires an single login.

Solve the "Stickerbook": Move away from chaotic, cross-selling across different apps. Create a structured, intent-based discovery model.

Initial Insights & Mental Models

Validation of Unification: Research confirmed high user demand for a unified digital ecosystem, eliminating app fatigue and fragmenting workflows.

Intent vs. Dashboard Architecture: Evaluated two core models:

• Concept 1 (Intent-Based): Organized around high-frequency customer goals. Users easily navigated quick actions, making it the superior architectural baseline.

• Concept 2 (Dashboard/Hub): Highlighted high-level account status updates. While users valued customizable status widgets, the complex navigation between "People" and "Home" created friction.

Mental Model Misalignments:

• Security vs. Connection: Grouping live location tracking alongside network security (VPNs) in "People" caused confusion.

• The "My Home" Split: Users struggled with a dual-purpose tab—expecting either hardware/IoT control or network management, but not both at once.

Design Decisions & System Architecture

Core Navigation (L1): Streamlined bloated navigation into five distinct pillars: People, My Home, Watch, Shop, and Account.

UI Refresh Shifted away from heavy brand colors to a neutral "stone" palette paired with modern neomorphic layering to increase visual clarity and hierarchy.

Tile-to-Widget Design System: Engineered a flexible UI pattern where bite-sized status tiles expand into rich, interactive widgets, lowering cognitive overload for complex actions.

Contextual Loyalty Integration: Removed "Loyalty" from primary navigation, embedding rewards contextually within workflow surfaces (e.g., surface a reward when managing a family line).

Research Synthesis & Iteration

Architectural Stress Testing: Conducted two research rounds evaluating
Concept 1 vs. Concept 2. Single-line users felt overwhelmed by family-centric views, prompting dynamic UI adjustments based on account tiers.

User Feedback Summary:
"More modern, streamlined, and cohesive with flat navigation that removes guesswork."

Core Takeaways: While users praised Concept 2’s customized dashboards, Concept 1’s intent-based structure proved far superior for usability, leading to a hybrid model that adopted intent navigation with the opportunity to customize based in the users preference or need.

Aligning multi-department business goals required navigating key trade-offs:

• Loyalty vs. Screen Real Estate: Product advocated for a top-level Loyalty tab to meet engagement targets. Using research data showing user resistance to transactional tabs in a companion app, I pitched an inline, contextual reward strategy that protected navigation usability while driving higher conversion.

• IoT Control vs. Network Management: Business teams wanted a single "Home" hub, but testing showed users separate network setup from smart home control. I led the architectural compromise to unify status views via extensible widgets rather than competing sub-menus.

Business Value & Deliverables

Executive Prototype: Built high-fidelity, interactive prototypes mapping end-to-end life scenarios (e.g., managing IoT smart climates, tracking family members, and filing device claims).

De-Risked Strategic Asset: Delivered a fully validated, production-ready blueprint that aligned cross-functional leadership, eliminating speculative debates and providing a "shelf-ready" asset.

Projected Impact: Validated UX performance to support key metrics, aiming to expand beyond the baseline 79.4M monthly visits and 56.5% engagement rate.