Addicted to Internet?
Pause your wi-fi
Role : Lead UX Designer (problem solving, wireframing, collaboration with Visuals, UX copy and PM teams)
Design Time : 5 weeks
Company : Airtel, a leading Indian telecom
Status : Live on Airtel Thanks App, Jun 2022
the problem
Easy & unlimited data availability for broadband users leads to high screen time and low family time.
users aged 16-64 spend an average of 7 hr 19 mins per day using internet.
major categories: social Media, communication apps, gaming & entertainment
-Digital 2022 India report
Airtel’s home broadband segment is reporting increasingly new acquisitions. It reported 46% on-year revenue growth in the March’22 quarter which is the highest in at least 10 years.
The internet usage stats for Indian kids are equally alarming. The fact that 84% of teens have their own mobile phone or tablet exacerbates the worry.
the goal
How might we
help wi-fi owners to monitor and control internet access on the connected devices?
research
What exists in the Indian market right now to monitor internet addiction?
| Literature Review: What are parental controls?
There are 4 parental control types:
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content filtering: limit access to age inappropriate content
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usage control: placing time-limits on usage
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usage management tools: enforcing use of softwares
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monitoring: tracking location and activity of device
| Competitors: Key features
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Google Family link : app to set screen time limits
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iPhone Parental Controls: web content, downtime, app limits
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Amazon Prime: viewing restriction on select devices
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Qustodio: Recurring screen time limits
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TP-Link router: online time limit, bedtime defaults, profiles
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Google Nest wi-fi: schedules, groups
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Amazon eero: profiles, schedules, content filters
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Circle home plus: profile, time limits, off time, bedtime
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Netgear Orbi: devices, profiles, content, off-time
| Brainstorming the unknowns
There are very less to no Indian players in telecom sector which directly provide a solution to this problem.
So we brainstormed in a Design and Product Management team of ~10 people to come up with all aspects that are currently unknown and would affect the long term vision for any solve. It was done remotely over FigJam.
principles
Design Principles
| Smart Defaults
Not every time users are sure what exactly they want to accomplish with a feature.
Give meaningful defaults to aid quick decision making
| Progressive Disclosure
Reveal one step at a time, and break decisions into steps.
2 pages with single decision are better than 1 page with multiple decisions.
| Error Prevention
Network related actions involve high error rate.
Display error prevention prompts at error prone points in the journey.
| Strong System Feedback
It might happen than users forget about the actions they took on app.
Show clear system status all time on the app to reduce their perplexity.
background
My wi-fi on Airtel Thanks app
All the Airtel broadband users can currently manage their wi-fi on Airtel Thanks App under My wi-fi dashboard, which looks like this.
They can check wi-fi health and manage connected devices from here. This new capability would be an incremental offering in this app section.
Ideation
approach #1
Separate Ingresses for Device & Device Groups
I first explored giving a common ingress on main My wi-fi page for parental controls. This ingress further bifurcated into two-
- pausing a single device
- pausing group of devices
Following is how this flow looked like:
Though this approach paved a nice start to envisioning the experience, but it had some flaws as came out in analysis with stakeholders and in Design Team Reviews:
CONS
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An extra added step of selecting pause type for every returning user to apply pause.
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Redundancy of maintaining list of devices and list of device groups and giving same action of pause/resume for each.
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My wi-fi analytics shows that average number of connected devices for our broadband users is 5 and every member of house owns 1 device usually. Other devices are shared by all members, like smart home devices. So device group creation and maintenance is overhead.
approach #2
Same Schedules for all types of pauses
To overcome challenges of approach #1, this second approach focussed on making pause just 2-step at max:
Step 1: Select at least one or more devices to be paused
Step 2: Set time limit for pause
This is how the flow looked like:
This beautifully solved for previous challenges and these were the highlights of experience:
PROS:
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Single ingress for any kind of schedule- single device/multi-device.
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Same device page can handle selection of any number of devices.
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Quick time defaults for less tech savvy users and for faster pauses.
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Custom time capability for power users with recurring schedule and future schedule options and further scope for scalability here.
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A schedules hub for managing all existing and creating new schedules in one place.
Approach #2 came out to be a much more cleaner and crisper experience and it aligned with the set design principles. So I expanded further on it.
And we further added the capability to let user's pause wi-fi completely so even any new devices connecting to it can not access internet when it's totally paused. This is how the complete user flow looked like.
User flow
Further Interaction Explorations
collaboration
Working with Content and Visuals team
At Airtel, we've separate Visuals and UX copy teams. I collaborated with them to help them understand the overall vision and tonality of feature and helped improve iterations from overall experience lens. Aspects like how the instructions should be, what are primary elements on each screen, what should be the order of information and collating the feedbacks from Product management and marketing team brought in multiple iterations.
before revision
after revision
crisp instructions
better as option than CTA
clear system status & CTA
before revision
after revision
all use cases upfront on onboarding and no missing due to carousel pages
results
Business Impact
This is the impact we captured right after hitting the market, without even any GTM plan in place.
| 20% increase in DAU
It went live for 3 major partner router brands in end of Jun'22. This lead to increase in Daily app usage by 20% in first month of roll out.
| 5K daily pause schedules
By Aug'22, The feature adoption has been decent.
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3K daily unique visitors.
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1K daily new users.
*not a public data & measured through app analytics
future roadmap
Rollouts & Functionalities
| Support for more routers
It's planned to be made live to 5 Mn users by Sept end, including support for more router brands.
| Adding more power
MVP offered usage time control. Successive releases will see capability for content filtering and usage monitoring.
| Monetising the feature
MVP was given as free feature. The idea is to monetise this going forward by offering it in Freemium model.
| Building strong proactive error recovery experience
network error can lead to users experiencing failed pause/resume actions and can leave them perplexed without feedback. Working on proactive complaint raising and resolution mechanism to keep them informed and resolve it faster.
