The idea behind xFi was to empower our customers to fully engage with their home WiFi networks. For this idea to come to life, xFi’s design had to be friendly and inviting with a human-centric point of view, rather than a technology-centric one. Though personalization and avatars, customers were given the ability to quickly monitor activity, set parental controls, pause devices and foster more productive household conversations around online activity. The same approach was applied to activation and troubleshooting, allowing customers direct access to network settings and tools, along with plenty of self-healing options. In a broader sense, xFi became our first step in our effort to revolutionize smart home management.

Through an exhaustive competitive analysis and a collaborative process between UX, Product, Development, Customer Experience, Accessibility, Marketing and Quality Assurance teams, we stripped out technical jargon and multi-stepped directions, focused on personalization, simplified management and easier access. The result is reduced confusion, condensed task time and a friction-free experience overall.

Engagement is one of the core objectives of xFi. To achieve this we used a design language that was friendly, inviting and relatable, with simple interfaces to control complex interactions, playful avatars and icons to identify users and devices. We also peppered in eye-catching illustrations and fun animations to help users better visualize and understand different processes and make the experience more enjoyable.

To extend xFi’s accessibility, we’ve made it available on several platforms, giving customers the freedom to access anytime from virtually anywhere. It’s currently available on iOS, Android, the web and our own X1 entertainment platform.

Initially, we targeted all of our high-speed Internet users as xFi customers, which is approximately 16 million people. In less than a year, almost two million people have downloaded the app, 1.2 million profiles have been created, and the function to pause devices, one of our most popular features, has been used to pause 4.5 million devices.

xFi has been in the works since late 2014, and was launched in April of 2017 with roadmaps covering the next 5 years. It’s poised to be one of our most essential services, the connective thread across Xfinity-branded products as well as other IoT devices essential to our customer’s lifestyle.