When AR wasn’t the answer and what we built instead
When a stakeholder bet on AR as the solution, I made sure to explore it honestly — and built the right answer regardless of where the evidence led.
■ NDA in place — some details have been intentionally left out. Happy to chat more if you're curious!
Where it Started
The home internet troubleshooting platform hadn't been meaningfully updated since 2016. Users — especially those with low tech familiarity — were getting stuck on complex issues like modem failures and network errors, and ending up on the phone with support when they shouldn't have needed to.
A stakeholder came to the table with a proposal: use Augmented Reality to guide users through equipment troubleshooting visually, in real time. The idea had real potential on paper. So we explored it seriously.
My Role
I took on more than the design work here. I reached out directly to stakeholders across product, tech, and content teams, mapped the full user journey from scratch, and used that map as the shared foundation for every decision that followed — including the harder ones.
Chapter one:
The AR Experiment
We started with a Proof of Concept from the tech team: AR overlays that could guide users through modem light identification in real time. On the surface, this was promising.
But early testing surfaced a big problem. The original interaction model — a swipe-to-select flow — had up to 380 possible combinations. That's not a troubleshooting tool, that's a maze.
I ran a perception test with 11 participants across different levels of tech comfort. Some of what we found was genuinely useful: users recognized their modem placement easily, and most had already tried restarting before calling support — which told us self-service intent was there, we just weren't meeting it well. I also organized a co-creation session with designers across squads to collectively work through the AR limitations we were hitting.
The right technology for this problem was Computational Vision, not AR. AR couldn't reliably read modem light statuses, performance suffered when capturing images, and the interaction overhead was too high for the users who needed this most.
We documented those findings clearly — not to kill the idea, but to show exactly where AR worked, where it didn't, and what would need to be true for it to succeed. The stakeholder was passionate about the tech, and I respected that. But my job was to make sure the design delivered for users, not to validate a predetermined answer.
We refined what we could — simplified the flow to: onboarding > AR-guided light detection > success/fail screen — and delivered the AR experience with our observations included.
Projected outcomes from AR testing
25% estimated reduction in support calls
20% projected improvement in issue resolution time
38% of users reported easier troubleshooting due to modem placement recognition during early tests
I moved on before the full rollout, so these figures reflect projections validated at handoff — not final measured outcomes.
Chapter two:
The redesign — the right solution
In parallel, we built the backup plan that turned out to be the real deliverable.
Working across technical and content teams, I led the redesign of the full troubleshooting system — using the journey map I'd created as the anchor. We removed redundant automated tests that were adding time without adding value, replaced generic illustrations with detailed screenshots that actually showed users what to do, and brought consistency across all the touchpoints that had drifted apart over the years.
We also introduced a centralized Support Hub: one place for users to track their service history, schedule a technical visit, and receive real-time updates. No more hunting across different parts of the app.
Projected outcomes at this handoff
30% faster troubleshooting experience
25% fewer steps to resolve common issues
15% projected decrease in support calls post-launch
Some caveat applies — these are the projections from the point of handoff, not post-launch measurements.
What this project was really about
The AR work taught me that good design sometimes means clearly articulating why something won't work — and having the research to back it up. The redesign taught me that consistency and simplification, done well, can outperform a shiny new technology.
And the stakeholder relationship? That was its own design challenge. You don't dismiss someone's vision — you take it seriously, test it properly, and let the evidence do the talking.
