The Challenge

Traditionally, NetComm’s portfolio of consumer devices had come from a range of OEM suppliers. Due to the number of suppliers and significant costs involved, the user interface customisation was minimal, usually just adjusting the logo and changing some colours.

While cost effective this resulted in an inconsistent brand experience and UI with a subpar user experience. NetComm has also fallen behind it’s competition who typically supplied phone apps as part of their offering.

I was tasked with creating a single interface and user experience that could be used across the entire consumer portfolio.

The brief for this project was deceptively simple, create a new user interface and experience that could be used across all NetComm consumer devices.

The first step to really understanding the task was to take a look at the base we would be building from. The OEM UI had almost 100 individual screens, with each click on the menu revealing more and more screens. These had been organised by technology type and there didn’t appear to be much though put into grouping like elements together to reduce the number of screens. Some contained nothing more that one table with no explanatory information, some contained so much information it was 2-3 times the depth of the screen.

I working with the engineer team in charge of the consumer devices to go through each of these pages to understand exactly what the various elements were. It became clear early on that there was a lot of functionality that confused even the engineering team so you can imagine how an average consumer would react.

Before tackling the main interface I knew that if we could streamline the installation of the device we would be solving the majority of issues that resulted in costly support calls.

I created a simple step-by-step user flow that would be displayed the first time the user connected to the device and ran them through the very basic elements that HAD to be setup for the modem to work. At the very least this would be the internet connection and Wi-Fi.

However while this would get the modem connected to the internet with Wi-Fi, it could still leave users needing to access the main interface to set up the rest of their device, so I added in the basic functionality that could be found in a device including VoIP and Timezone (needed for Parental Control). To enhance security I also added the option to change the basic admin password as this was seen as something that most users didn’t cange, resulting in a large security hole.

Creating the main interface was going to be a very large task, I decided upon a 3 tier approach and in conjunction with NetComm’s engineering team we set out to break the functionality into 3 groups, basic, intermediate, advanced.

As luck would have it the basic had been covered off already by the wizard so the main menu structure took it’s cues from that and came together reasonable quickly as it had already been tested. Next was the intermediate features, these were classed by one team member as “Advanced, but not Propeller-head advanced“.

So as to not overwhelm users these would be hidden until they interacted with a More Settings option which would then display the additional options.

I also made a few “quality of life” additions to the interface including a Quick Tasks option in the top menu which came out of the research and the main reasons people were accessing the GUI.

In addition to this in the bottom menu bar I included information and quick links to areas that were commonly accessed by support staff to reduce the time spent helping the user navigate to them.