Vodafone Idea IT Infrastructure App Redesign

Redesigning the app that runs Vodafone Idea's IT infrastructure — for the people climbing towers to keep it running.

Field Engineers, FE Managers, SMEs, and Corporate Users were all working off fragmented systems with no shared visibility. Manual daily operations meant low efficiency and constant room for error. Automation tools didn't talk to each other, which meant compliance gaps, wasted resources, and — in a business governed by SLAs — real financial penalties every time something slipped through the cracks.

The existing app made it worse. It served only two of the four user types, leaving SMEs and Corporate Users without a system built for how they actually work. And the one group doing the most physically demanding job — Field Engineers, who spend most of their day outdoors, often on electric towers under direct sun — were handed an interface in brand-red, a color that all but disappears in bright daylight. Usability had quietly lost to brand guidelines. The approach: Understand the org before the interface. Work started with the IT Infrastructure team directly, mapping out the four user types and four sub-domains the app needed to serve, then translating that into a clear user hierarchy and a set of personas grounded in real interviews — not assumptions.

Design for the environment, not the boardroom. This is an internal, task-critical tool, so the priority was never visual polish for its own sake. It was legibility on a phone screen in direct sunlight, halfway up a tower. That reframed even a settled decision like brand color as something worth challenging.

Look outward before designing inward. A competitor scan — starting with Airtel — grounded the information architecture in how the rest of the industry structures similar tools, rather than designing in a vacuum.

One app, four domains, one structure. The result: a single bundled information architecture serving Fiber, Transmission, Mobility, and Enterprise under one roof — a home screen, task flows, and consistent top and bottom navigation built to flex across all four user types instead of forcing each into someone else's workflow. Where it stands: The redesign was presented back to the IT Infrastructure stakeholders who'd shaped it from the start. The moment that landed hardest wasn't a slide of navigation patterns — it was seeing a Field Engineer on a tower represented in the design itself. It told the room the team building this actually understood who they were building for.

One Force is rolling out in phases, with the current designs marking the first drafts of a system built to scale across all four verticals as it deploys.

Key takeaway from the meetings: User Types: The app will be used by four types of users:

Field Engineer (FE)

FE Manager

SME

Corp User

4 sub-domains under IT Infrastructure

Fiber

Transmission

Mobility

Enterprise

Optimize IT infrastructure and efficiency: As India’s leading telecom operator providing connectivity to nearly 270 million mobile customers (as of December 2020), Vodafone Idea Limited needed to optimize its IT infrastructure.

Teams’ manual daily operations resulted in low operational efficiency and multiple errors.

Disconnects between automation tools caused security and compliance risks, inefficient use of resources, and financial penalties caused by frequent breaches in service-level agreements (SLAs).

A bundled app for all the users in all 4 domains: With a bundled app, Vodafone Idea Limited will improve the service management platform that offers business units IT visibility and control regardless of location or operating system.

An integrated app with its automation tools into a unified platform, dashboard, auditing, and reporting system.

During the internal meeting with the IT Infrastructure team: they appreciated the presentation.

They appreciated the presentation. I noticed a sense of relief when they saw the image of a Field Engineer on the tower, as it reassured them that our team is capable of successfully executing the redesign.

Given that this is a bundled app with numerous screens, the above are just initial drafts of the design team's work. These screens will be deployed in phases.