Xfinity My Account
Comcast's self-service portal

Xfinity ‘My Account’ is the online self-service portal for all Xfinity customers, where they can pay their bill, manage their devices, and troubleshoot their services.

Studio Rodrigo has had a long-lasting relationship with the design division at Comcast/Xfinity. This time the studio was brought in to lead the complete re-architecture of the “My Account” website.

To start things off, the big internal Rodrigo team was split in two: Visual and UX. Mike Klodginski and I worked on reorganizing the entire website and restructuring the navigation. The team of visual designers worked on multiple iterations of a new visual language strategy for the site. Ritik Dholakia and Khoi Uong, the founders of Studio Rodrigo, were leading strategy and art direction.

We were always taking into consideration our audience. Our main demographic was older and less tech-savvy. Our users were coming into the site with specific tasks in mind: pay a bill, troubleshoot an issue, change settings, etc.

One of the tactics I brought in and fought for was letting the users find what they were looking for in multiple places. For example, if a user was looking for their WiFi password, it should be easy to find on the modem/router information page and on the internet service page. I wanted to link to important targets from any and all pages that made sense.

I also wanted to keep our users super focused on what task they were tackling, so I opted for a clean, full-screen flow for each task. This worked well as it allowed us to link each flow from multiple sections of the site and easily come back to the starting point.

After about a year of design, iteration, and development work, the new site launched.

Our multi-year collaborative working relationship with Comcast continued as we helped overhaul and streamline their customer self-service tools across web and mobile platforms.

After the successful launch of the new My Account website, our team shifted gears and became embedded within the Comcast design division. For the majority of the time, I acted as the Design Director for 'Xfinity My Account' (filling in for the lovely Sabina Fletcher, who got promoted within Comcast). I was In charge of a team of about 3-5 designers, 2-3 copywriters, and 1-2 project managers (on both the Rodrigo side and Comcast side) and worked alongside the Product, Dev, and QA teams at Comcast.

My team and I were in charge of all the design aspects of the My Account sprint work. The goal was to pull in the remaining features from the old site and add new ones that would improve the experience.

We received new feature requests from the product team (led by the wonderful Darcy Feuerstein), and quickly presented them with possible solutions for the problem.

Once copy and legal would approve, we would go into grooming with the dev team (led by Dan Freiman), where we would make sure our designs were viable and covered all error states and break points.

We then supported the dev process and QA process (led by Sunitha Musuku).

As the work picked up speed, I was able to affect and improve the agile sprint work process. I pushed to add a UX Review step that would be completed before functional QA started. This additional visual review was done by myself or my team and included a walkthrough of the devs’ work in all breakpoints and states.

As part of the UX review, I would annotate the devs’ screenshots with pink text and markings, then return them to the dev and product team to be fixed. The term “Pink Notes” was coined and is still in use and UX Review is now a required step in the QA process.

One of my favorite design challenges is explaining complex concepts. I got to do a lot of that during my time with Comcast.

The goal was to make the right visual aid that would help me or product leads explain the situation with voice-over. I made a lot of diagrams to explain complicated technical situations, requirements, and business prerequisites.

Here are some examples:

Working at Comcast, I got to enjoy the best of both worlds: I got to experience a very focused work-track as an in-house designer and still enjoy the social perks of working at a small New York agency.

Our Rodrigo team would take the Acela once a week down to beautiful Philadelphia to have a super intense day of meetings, work-sessions, and presentations at the new Comcast Center. We’d chat and snack and some colleagues would laugh at my jokes 😊. I’d sit around with devs and catch up on TV talk. I got to work with and enjoyed the company of many many great designers and creatives, whom I’m still friends with today.

Spending time on a Comcast project was a right of passage at Studio Rodrigo, and since I was leading one for so long, I got to onboard and work with a lot of designers over the course of 5 years. I love collaborating with others and mentoring young designers so this was a joy for me. New teammates would pitch-in for a while and help with one project and then move on to "more exciting" things.

We wrapped up our engagement with My Account at the end of 2019, the longest in our long-term working relationship with the UX and product teams at Comcast.

Moving new product and design ideas through a big company is always a challenge, but the team at Comcast is driven and passionate about giving their users a better experience. We are proud to have helped them move the needle!

Since the My Account re-architecture launch in 2016, the number of visits to the site went up more than 20% and Xfinity’s NPS has gone up more than 18 points. Customers are now solving their problems online instead of calling, leading to less time spent on the site. More users are paying online and signing up for Autopay, which translates to a revenue increase of tens of millions of dollars a month.

Personally, I love knowing that I made a difference for 30 million Comcast users by making the My Account experience better.