MiFi devices are technically complex, yet primarily used by non-technical users. From a business perspective, first-time success and low support costs were critical. The challenge was to transform a router-like device into a reassuring home-internet experience.
The brief was to make all technical complexity invisible — firmware behavior, network dependencies, hardware limits — without reducing functionality. Every design decision was a negotiation between what the system could do and what the user needed to feel.
I held the full product experience — from defining UX principles across hardware and interface, to designing onboarding flows and acting as the decision bridge between product, engineering, and industrial design.
Delivered end-to-end — from concept to deployment — in 4 months, leading a cross-continental team of 5 across Paris and China (Design, PM, Engineering and Developer).
The white-label architecture was designed to scale from day one, enabling deployment across European markets without redesign. The UX principles established on MiFi became the foundation for subsequent CPE product lines, directly contributing to the company's ability to expand its hardware portfolio and attract new operator clients.
MiFi combined a physical device with a browser-based SaaS interface — two products that had to feel like one. It was positioned not as a technical router, but as “portable internet made simple.”This required reframing the product from a device with features to an experience centered on reassurance.
Clarity over completeness
We avoided exposing all available technical settings.
Guidance over configuration
The onboarding guided users step-by-step instead of requiring setup knowledge.
Reassurance over control
Clear confirmation states were prioritized over advanced customization.
In practice, this meant translating firmware behavior into UX decisions in real time — not waiting for engineering to flag a problem, but being present enough in technical conversations to catch constraints before they became user-facing issues.
The experience didn't start at the screen. It started at unboxing — the moment someone held the device for the first time. Physical interaction, status communication, daily usage scenarios — design decisions ran across all of it. The interface was one layer of that system, not the whole thing.
