The Xfinity app holds 4.3 stars across 1.4M ratings — proof of real capability, with user feedback pointing to one consistent opportunity: findability. Every feature exists; the experience is spread across five tabs, four outage surfaces, and role-gated navigation that silently disappears. This is a working prototype of a simpler structure, plus the map, audit, and requirements behind it.
WiFi healthy · 24 devices online · 42 Mbps up
Flows
Every ISP app lives or dies on a handful of jobs. Here is each one as a tap path — the current app's documented route against the redesign's, counted honestly from a cold app open. The most common job of all now costs zero taps: the answer is the first pixel.
Steps in magenta lanes follow Comcast's documented navigation; green lanes are live in the prototype. Counts exclude the app open itself.
Across the five core jobs — and the single most frequent job drops from four taps to none. The savings come from the map, not from cramming shortcuts onto one screen: quick actions are deep-links into each feature's one true home.
Same event, same repair time, same customer. The only variable is the app. The current experience loses trust twice: once while the customer hunts for answers, and again three weeks later when the credit has to be asked for. The redesign converts the same bad night into a demonstration that the company has it handled.
Screen map
Left to right: the app as documented by Comcast's own support material today, then the reimagined structure. Magenta marks the duplication — the same job reachable from multiple tabs is what makes a feature-complete app harder to navigate than it should be.
The whole IA in one picture. Solid lines are ownership — each feature orbits exactly one tab. Dashed magenta lines are the only other kind of connection allowed: deep-links. The Assistant sits inside the ring because it is a layer, not a place; it can reach any node but owns none.
From Comcast's support documentation and App Store listing. Features tagged ×2 or ×3 appear on that many surfaces; entries marked with a role tag disappear entirely for lower roles.
Each tab answers one question. Every feature has exactly one address; the assistant deep-links to it rather than duplicating it. All screens below are live in the prototype.
The buildable surface area of the redesign: 10 screens plus the Assistant overlay, all working in the prototype. "Owner" is the tab that holds the feature (Principle P3 — one address per feature); everything else listed under "Reached from" is a deep-link, never a copy. Multiply by 3 roles and 2 network states for the full render matrix: 66 screen-states from one map.
| Screen | Owner | Reached from | Interactive elements |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Tab | Launch · tab bar | Status gauge, outage banner, 4 quick actions, bill tile, visit tile, network-health link |
| Outage | Home | Banner · Assistant deep-link | Repair timeline, area map, SMS-updates toggle, credit status |
| WiFi | Tab | Tab bar · Home network-health link | Network card, speed test, credentials link, devices link, camera live, security toggle, hotspots |
| Name & password | WiFi | WiFi · "Share WiFi" quick action | Password show/hide, QR share, guest-network toggle, advanced settings |
| Devices | WiFi | WiFi · "Pause device" quick action · Assistant deep-link | Working All/People/Smart filter, 5 pause/resume controls, bedtime-mode toggle |
| Plan | Tab | Tab bar | Internet usage meter, 2 mobile lines, manage lines, Explore (role-gated) |
| Speed picker | Plan | Plan · Explore · "Speed" quick action — gated to Primary | 3 tier radios, live "good for" list, full price, review step |
| Bill | Account | Home bill tile · Account · Assistant deep-link | Pay early, what-changed list with credit, statement history |
| Technician visit | Home | Home visit tile | Reschedule, cancel, prep checklist |
| Account | Tab | Tab bar | Profile edit, people & roles, billing link, settings, device activation |
| Assistant | Layer | FAB · "Ask" quick action, on every screen | Chat, 3 quick prompts, deep-links into Bill / Devices / Outage |
The flow Stefan called out. Today it's coherent as a feature list but scattered as an experience — four surfaces, and the credit must be requested. The redesign collapses it to one screen reached from one banner, with the credit automatic.
5 hops · 4 surfaces · credit on request
1 hop · 1 surface · credit automatic, stated on the bill
Current-app audit
Sourced from Comcast's own support documentation, the App Store listing, and forum threads. The app isn't missing features — it's missing a point of view about where each feature lives.
How many places in the app claim the same job. Magenta is today; green is the redesign. Every job collapses to one owning surface — everything else becomes a deep-link.
Everything is there. Finding it is the work.
A landing page with no thesis: greeting, billing, news feed, appointments, a store finder, and the outage banner all compete. Billing here duplicates Account; the Assistant entry duplicates the floating one.
Half service management (usage, lines), half storefront (add a line, change data plan, international passes) with no visual boundary between them. Troubleshooting routes out to the Assistant.
The absorbed xFi app, and the strongest tab — network, devices, pausing, hotspots, advanced settings. Its sin is what it can't see: the smart-home devices one tab over. Hidden entirely from Viewers.
Cameras, smart devices, security status, and modes — a second device list that overlaps WiFi's. To a user, a camera is just another thing on the network. Also hidden from Viewers.
Identity and money, plus a third copy of billing and more upgrade surfaces. Mostly sound — it's the one tab whose question ("who am I, what do I pay?") is almost crisp.
Persistent 24/7 chat and the front door for troubleshooting and outage credits. Powerful, but it duplicates destinations instead of linking to them — and the credit requires asking.
Documented behavior per role. When a tab is absent rather than locked, users can't tell missing-by-design from broken — the design-systems conversation waiting to happen.
| Capability | Primary | Manager | Member | Viewer | Guest (SIM) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Billing — view & pay | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| WiFi tab | Yes | Yes | Yes | Tab absent | Tab absent |
| Home / smart home tab | Yes | Yes | Yes | Tab absent | Tab absent |
| Plan changes & upgrades | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Outage status | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Partial |
The redesign's answer: one app for every role. Locked cards stay in place, dimmed, labeled with who can open them — try the Viewer switch under the prototype phone.
A redesign that only audits its predecessor isn't credible. This is the usability review of the prototype itself — every finding was fixed in the current build, and the fixes are traceable to the principle they serve.
| Finding | Violates | Severity | Fix, live in the prototype |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed changes were reachable by every role — Members and Viewers could open the tier picker, though only Primary/Manager may change plans. | R-03 · P4 | High | Role gate on the Speed screen: non-Primary roles get "🔒 Plan changes — Mikel (Primary) can do this," and Explore dims with the same message. |
| Status changes and toasts were invisible to screen readers — the gauge verdict and every confirmation were visual-only. | R-51 | High | The gauge verdict chip and the toast are polite live regions; outage flips and confirmations now announce. |
| The speed test had two owners — a "Run a speed test" card on Home duplicated the one inside WiFi, the exact ×2 pattern the audit flags in the current app. | R-02 · P3 | Medium | Home's card became "Network health," a deep-link into WiFi — the single owner of the test. |
| Device filter chips were decorative — All / People / Smart home highlighted but filtered nothing, teaching users that controls lie. | P2 | Medium | The filter acts on the device model: People shows phones and laptops, Smart home shows TV, camera, thermostat. |
| "Pay now" beside "Autopay on" read as a double charge — the two statements contradicted each other on the Bill screen. | R-32 | Medium | Copy is now "Pay early," the subline says "pays itself Sep 3," and the confirmation states autopay is skipped. |
| The "Pause" quick action was ambiguous — pause what? It read as a media control. | P2 | Low | Relabeled "Pause device." |
Still on the watch list: the assistant button can hover over the last list item on shorter phones (mitigated with scroll padding, needs device testing), and the gradient hairlines and glow are decorative only — no state is ever encoded in them, per R-55.
Redesign spec
Five principles drive every screen in the prototype; the numbered requirements below them are the buildable contract. IDs are stable so screens, map nodes, and audit findings can reference them.
The app's first pixel answers "is my service working?" Everything else — bill, visits, offers — queues behind that answer. During an outage the whole Home screen reorganizes around it.
Home: what needs me? WiFi: my network and what's on it. Plan: what am I paying for and using? Account: who are we and how do we pay? A feature that answers two questions is two features.
Nothing lives in two tabs. Cross-references are links, not copies — the bill card on Home opens the Bill screen owned by Account. Duplication is how navigation debt accumulates.
Every role sees the same map. Locked areas are visibly locked with the owning role named. A Viewer's app looks like everyone's app — just with keys they don't hold yet.
Offers live in labeled Explore surfaces, opt-in, with the full post-change price shown before commitment. A support flow never ends in an upsell.
A requirement that serves no principle is scope creep; a principle with no requirements is a poster. Each dot below is at least one numbered requirement in the sections that follow.
| Requirement group | P1 · Status first | P2 · One question | P3 · One address | P4 · Roles inform | P5 · Sales separate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Information architecture · R-01–03 | |||||
| Home & outage · R-10–13 | |||||
| WiFi & devices · R-20–23 | |||||
| Plan, billing & sales · R-30–34 | |||||
| Assistant · R-40–42 | |||||
| Accessibility & craft · R-50–55 |
Four bottom tabs — Home, WiFi, Plan, Account — with the Assistant as a floating layer, never a fifth tab.Collapses today's 5+1 model; WiFi absorbs the Home tab's devices (P2, P3).
Every feature has exactly one owning screen; all other appearances are deep-links.Eliminates the ×2/×3/×4 duplication mapped in the Screen map (P3).
All roles render identical navigation; gated features show a lock state naming the required role, with a one-tap "ask the Primary" request.Replaces tab-absence for Viewer/Guest (P4).
Home opens with a connection-status object (gauge + verdict) computed from gateway telemetry, above all other cards.P1. Healthy state shows speed and device count; degraded states name the cause.
The entire outage journey — live repair timeline, affected-area map, SMS updates toggle, and credit status — is one screen, reached from one banner.Replaces the 5-hop, 4-surface flow (app → details → map → SMS → chat).
Outage credits are applied automatically and stated ("Credit already applied"), never requested through chat.The single highest-leverage trust move in the app.
During an outage, Home demotes the status gauge to "Service interrupted" and promotes the outage banner to the top slot; the hotspot finder is surfaced as the fallback connectivity path.
One device model spans phones, TVs, cameras, and smart-home hardware, filterable by All / People / Smart home; pause, prioritize, and schedules act on any of them.Merges the WiFi and Home tabs' duplicate device lists.
Network credentials support show/hide, QR share, and a separately toggled guest network on one screen.
Cameras and Advanced Security appear inside WiFi as device-level cards with live-view and per-device history; "modes" become schedules attached to device groups.
Device filter chips (All / People / Smart home) act on the single device model — a filter that highlights without filtering is a defect, not a style.Added by the prototype self-review; live in the Devices screen.
Plan shows internet + mobile with real-time usage meters per line; nothing on this screen is a purchase surface.
Speed changes use the tier-picker pattern (the reference screenshot, rebuilt native): compare tiers, see "good for" guidance, and the full new monthly total — taxes in — before any Review step.P5. No change commits without an explicit review screen.
One Bill screen owns amount, due date, autopay, payment, "what changed vs last month" (credits called out), and 24 months of statements.Replaces three billing surfaces (Overview card, Account section, Assistant answers).
All offers live under an "Explore" label with dashed-border styling distinct from service cards; entering an offer flow is always opt-in.
When autopay is on, the manual payment action is labeled as paying early, the subline states when autopay runs, and the confirmation says the scheduled payment is skipped — a bill screen never implies a double charge.Added by the prototype self-review.
The Assistant doubles as universal search: every screen, setting, and help topic is reachable by asking.
Assistant answers resolve to deep-links into owning screens ("bill is lower" → Bill; "feels slow" → Devices), never to parallel chat-only flows.P3 applied to conversation.
The Assistant is outage-aware: during an incident it leads with status and the hotspot fallback before any troubleshooting script.
All interactive targets ≥44pt; primary actions in the bottom half of the screen for one-thumb reach.
Status is never color-alone: gauges, pills, and banners pair color with a word ("Healthy", "60% used", "Interrupted").
Numbers align with tabular figures; money and data amounts always show their unit and period.
Reduced-motion honors the OS setting; ambient aurora, screen transitions and the status gauge fall back to instant states.
Status changes and confirmations announce through polite live regions — the gauge verdict and toasts are heard, not just seen.Added by the prototype self-review.
Decorative treatments — gradient hairlines, glow, grain, the ghosted brand mark — never encode state. Every state carries a text label a decoration-blind reader still gets.Added by the prototype self-review.
Roadmap
A redesign that ships once regrows its complexity one "just add it to Overview" at a time. Three guards against that: a placement algorithm every future feature must pass, a rollout that sequences the risky moves behind the cheap ones, and metrics that catch drift before reviews do.
Run every proposed feature through this, in order, and stop at the first yes. If it reaches the bottom, it is not a new surface. This one diagram is the difference between an IA and a pile of screens.
Sequenced so every phase ships user-visible value on its own, and the scariest migration (removing a tab) happens only after behavior data proves the new paths carry the load.
Four numbers, each tied to a principle. The review-sentiment metric keeps the work honest about the thing users feel most directly: how easy the app is to navigate.