Skim, Dip, Dive: Re-architecting the L1 mobile experience
How a centralized navigation framework transformed a dense, fragmented application into an elegant pathfinder system. This initiative drove a 60% engagement lift while protecting long-term design governance.
Monthly Engagement
Sustained across active app users.
iOS App Store Rating
Accompanied by 4.8 on Google Play.
Ecosystem Impressions
Spurring 1M+ unique ecosystem sub-visits.
The Problem
The legacy My Verizon application had become a victim of its own ambition. As a product handling everything from billing to connected home device management, it had gradually turned into an aggregation point for competing internal priorities. Each team was surfacing their work at the top layer with no one governing the whole.
The result was predictable: feature bloat that buried intuitive user paths, suppressed core revenue discovery, and drove a measurable spike in customer support contacts. The app needed a hierarchy, not more features.
Governance Model
The answer was the "Skim, Dip, Dive" architecture. The framework reframes the home dashboard not as a final destination, but as an information processing strategy. It lets customers work through a dense product one intentional layer at a time. My job was to operationalize it and make sure it actually held.
That meant treating it not just as a design pattern, but as a governance tool. I established clear rules for what belonged at the Skim layer versus the Dive level, giving cross-functional teams an objective lens for evaluating new feature requests and making it harder to justify bloating the L1 for any one team's priority.
Alignment
Shipping this required me to work across three organizational fronts at once. The design work was only part of the job.
I reframed our UX work in the language of growth metrics that product managers already owned. That translation shifted conversations away from "whose feature gets surfaced" and toward shared structural outcomes, which made it a lot harder to argue against.
The framework required patterns that didn't exist in the global design system. I made the case for those departures directly with system maintainers, arguing that localized nuance was necessary where scannability was the primary goal, and got alignment on the exceptions we needed.
I worked closely with engineering to find frontend solutions that could support the new layout model without taking on performance debt. Some of the best decisions in the final product came directly out of those technical conversations.
Key Takeaways
- • Reducing noise at the top is a growth lever. Every time we cleared L1 clutter, completion rates went up downstream. It wasn't subtle.
- • A shared framework is a negotiation tool. Having Skim, Dip, Dive on the table meant feature prioritization conversations had an anchor. That changed everything.
- • Simplicity needs a guardian. The hardest part of this project wasn't designing the system. It was making sure it didn't quietly erode once we shipped it.
Strategic Horizon
- • I'd want to go deeper on behavioral data: which L1 features are actually earning their spot based on what users do, not just what teams ask for.
- • There's an opportunity to make the layout feel more personal without fracturing the core hierarchy. Contextual states based on account activity feel like the right next layer.
- • Skim, Dip, Dive shouldn't live only in the app. I'd love to see it become a shared mental model across the broader Verizon ecosystem.
See the experience in action
Explore the My Verizon app on the iOS App Store to see the core interface transformations live.