Skim, Dip, Dive: a clearer front door for the My Verizon app
I redesigned the top of the My Verizon app as a clear starting point for billing, plans, and devices, then turned the framework behind it into the rules teams design by. 60% of app owners open it every month.
Monthly engagement
Share of app owners who open the app each month.
iOS App Store rating
And 4.8 on Google Play.
Ecosystem impressions
Views of the entry points into the wider Verizon ecosystem.
The Problem
The app needed hierarchy, not more features.
My Verizon handled everything from billing to connected home, and it had become an aggregation point for competing internal priorities. Each team surfaced its work at the top layer, with no one governing the whole.
the result
- Buried paths
- Suppressed revenue discovery
- Spiked support contacts
What Shipped
Clear entry points on every tab.
The Skim layer gives the Me, Mobile, and Home tabs the same scannable structure, with a clear path into everything else.
Mapping the Opportunity
Six themes became the guide for design decisions.
Before I could fix the L1, I had to define what was actually broken. Workshop outputs, historical research, stakeholder interviews, and customer feedback resolved into six recurring themes, and Skim, Dip, Dive had to answer to all of them.
- 01Navigation complexity & structure
- 02Lack of centralized information
- 03Account & plan management
- 04Usability issues & dead ends
- 05Visual & interaction overload
- 06Service & feature clarity
Governance Model
Skim, Dip, Dive lets customers move through a dense product one layer at a time.
A framework only matters if teams use it, so I turned it into rules every team could apply.
the proof
Mapped the entire legacy app and website against it.
Screen by screen, pressure-testing the framework against every edge case I could find.
The evidence that sold it to product and business
the rules
Turned a design pattern into a governance tool.
Clear rules for what belongs at the Skim layer versus the Dive level gave teams a straight answer when a new feature request came in.
Harder to bloat the L1 for any one priority
Rules in Practice
Two early requests taught me how the rules should work.
shortcuts
Keep promotions out of the shortcuts.
There was a push to add a promotion to the L1 shortcuts, and it made sense, since that's where customers look first. But shortcuts exist to get customers where they need to go, and the moment they become ad space, customers stop trusting them. Shortcuts stayed navigation, and offers stayed where customers shop.
Set a precedent for the requests that followed
dead ends
Let a prototype make the argument.
Making every usage subtitle tappable seemed right, but each tap led to the same destination because the L2 that would justify them didn't exist yet. I built a working prototype that let everyone feel the dead end in about thirty seconds.
Now I reach for a prototype before a debate
Alignment
I worked with product, the design system team, and engineering in parallel.
product management
Translated UX into the growth metrics PMs already owned.
The conversation moved from "whose feature gets surfaced" to shared outcomes everyone could get behind.
One set of outcomes across product teams
design system
Showed the difference side by side.
One version with out-of-box components and one lightly customized. The comparison made the case.
Custom patterns joined the global library
engineering
Worked through the layout with engineering early.
Engineering and I found frontend approaches that supported the new layout model without taking on performance debt. Some of the best final decisions came out of those conversations.
New layout, no performance debt
Where It Fell Short
L2 never got the same rigor.
The L1 came out tight, but we never had the capacity to rework L2. Some of it still carries redundancies that teams are working through today.
What I learned
Reducing noise at the top is a growth lever.
Every time I pushed clutter out of the L1, completion rates went up downstream.
A shared framework is a negotiation tool.
With Skim, Dip, Dive on the table, prioritization conversations finally had an anchor.
Keeping the L1 simple is ongoing work.
Keeping the system from eroding after launch took as much work as designing it.
What I'd do next
Let behavior decide what goes in the L1.
Go deeper on which features belong there based on what customers do, not just what teams ask for.
Personalize without breaking the hierarchy.
Showing different things based on what's going on in someone's account feels like the right next layer.
see it live
The My Verizon app is live on iOS and Android.