Next Gen Airtel App

Redefining the Airtel app around its most engaged customers

17% of users drive 45% of app transactions · 5% uptake on Next Best Action · 45 journeys redesigned

I led the experience vision, positioning, and information architecture redesign for the Next Gen Airtel App, starting with a simple question: How do we make the app meaningfully more useful for the 6.5M customers who rely on it most? 

We identified these power users as a critical opportunity, rethought how the app should organise and surface value around their needs, and then proved the strategy on the one screen every customer opens first—the homepage.

I led a team of 5 designers, working closely with the design-system team, across 45 journeys to create a more contextual, proactive, and cohesive Airtel experience.

Old homepage vs. new homepage

The Challenge

Airtel’s app had evolved as a place to sell SIM plans—narrow, conversion-led journeys designed around lead generation and a single purchase. The experience worked like a product page: arrive, decide, convert, leave. That made sense when Airtel had a relatively small set of products and customers largely knew what they came for.

But the business had outgrown that model. Airtel was no longer just a SIM provider; mobility, home broadband, and financial services had all become part of the same ecosystem. Yet the app was still organised around individual products and transactions rather than the broader relationship customers had with Airtel.

Serve CLP Old vs. New

Brand storytelling was incidental, discovery was limited, and after conversion, the app had little reason to bring customers back beyond service and support.

The challenge was bigger than redesigning the app. It was to redefine what the Airtel app was for—and build an experience model that could grow with the business and the relationship customers had with the brand.

What We Learned

Before redesigning anything, I wanted to know who the app actually worked for. Power users — active three consecutive months with five or more transactions — were only 17% of the quarterly transacting base, about 6.5 million people out of 38 million, but they drove 45% of all transactions.

Nearly three-quarters of what they did in the app was Wi-Fi, DTH, and recharging connections that weren't their own — this wasn't really a personal utility app for them, it was household management. Roughly half were between 30 and 50, the classic family-manager age band, and just under 40% were salaried — a specific, targetable profile, not a vague "engaged user."

That reframed the whole brief. The app's best users weren't managing their own line; they were managing everyone's.

My Role

I was the Senior Design Lead, leading a team of five designers with support from the design-system team. My role spanned both setting the experience direction and hands-on design.

I personally designed Homepage, Family Mode, and Travel Mode end-to-end, each over a little more than two months.

For the rest of the app—including category landing pages, and Ask Us—I led the workshops that established the design direction: visual hierarchy, card and component treatments, typography, interaction patterns, content structure, and the rationale behind what appeared where. The team then extended and applied this system across approximately 45 journeys, ensuring the new experience remained coherent at scale.

The Strategic Response

Instead of designing around a single conversion journey, we designed for three distinct journey types:

• Discovery — helping customers understand what Airtel offered beyond a SIM.

• Decision — giving customers the information, comparisons, and trade-offs they needed to make a confident choice, rather than pushing them straight to a buy button.

• Brand & Delight — creating moments that had nothing to sell, but made the Airtel relationship more useful, rewarding, and worth returning to. This was a completely new role for the app.
  

Three principles carried this thinking across every screen:

Clarity creates momentum. Customers should never have to hunt for the information or action they need.

One task at a time. We moved away from dense, information-heavy screens towards focused journeys that let customers complete one thing without unnecessary cognitive load.

Numbers come first. Much of what customers come to the app for—a bill, balance, data allowance, validity—is fundamentally numerical. We therefore made the number the primary visual hierarchy, rather than burying it inside supporting copy.

We evolved the Gen 4 design system alongside the product, carrying the same principles into its visual and component language: cleaner hierarchy, greater focus, and a more deliberate number-first approach. This meant the strategy wasn't just expressed through a handful of redesigned screens—it became a system the wider app could consistently build on.

Next Best Action

The clearest expression of this strategy is Next Best Action, the dynamic module we introduced at the top of the homepage.

The starting insight was almost an anti-pattern for a utility app: customers shouldn't have to search for what they need. Unlike Blinkit or Amazon, where discovery is part of the value, most people open Airtel for a small set of predictable needs—a bill, a recharge, a service issue. So instead of making customers navigate to the right action, the app should anticipate it and surface it first.

Next Best Action module

The old homepage had a “current service” card with a generic status such as “action due.” It told customers that something needed attention without telling them what mattered most. A pending loan instalment, for example, could remain completely invisible behind a generic service status.

Next Best Action replaced this with a single dynamic module at the top of the homepage, powered by a cohort-based decision engine. It determines what is most relevant for each customer at that moment—a recharge nearing expiry, a bill due, a missed-call alert, a service-request update—and surfaces one clear action instead of a list of possibilities.

The principle was simple: don't make customers find the next thing to do; make the app tell them. The module is now live, with 5% uptake on recommendations from this single homepage module—evidence that a small change in how we prioritised information could meaningfully change customer behaviour.

Also Shipped

The same diversification logic shaped the category landing pages. Airtel had outgrown being a SIM-only proposition, so we created dedicated spaces for Mobility, Wi-Fi, and Finance where customers could understand and explore the breadth of Airtel before making a decision—rather than being dropped straight into a lead form.

I set the design direction for these pages rather than designing them directly, establishing a reusable structure across categories: benefits communicated visually rather than buried in paragraphs, a boxy and scannable layout, FAQs surfaced early, and key information available upfront rather than progressively hidden behind additional screens.

The same system extended to Money Management and Ask Us, giving financial services and support a more intentional place in the app instead of treating them as secondary functions buried within account settings.

Two of the most distinctive experiences to emerge from this strategy were Family Mode and Travel Mode—situational experiences designed around how customers actually use Airtel in different contexts. Both go deeper into the research, product thinking, and design decisions behind the work, so I've treated them as standalone case studies.