Driven by a relentless bar for quality and sophistication, the Plume product team journey was incredible for driving progress while buffeted by the merciless surprise demands crop up at the breakneck pace of start up company growth.
Plume WiFi began as a strictly consumer product, but by 2018 we were already building new products to aid Communications Service Providers (CSPs/ISPs) and to craft new messaging pertaining to these enterprise customers.
It's 2016, and no one has ever heard of "mesh" WiFi or other distributed solutions. The consumer only knows about WiFi routers with bigger and bigger antennas, and WiFi "extenders" that always suck.
It's not enough to be groundbreaking technology that solves a ubiquitous frustration in modern homes. We must be a product that is understood, embraced, and converts users into ambassadors.
We set out to create a solution to bad WiFi that was more than a utility. It is to be a product with emotional journey and an experience to show there is more behind the veil of consumer simplification than machine intelligence. There is a team with conviction the muscle to takes beyond today's expectations.
Even at our beginnings, the product was more than an app, and more than hardware. It was a synthesis of inspiring interfaces, tactile experiences, proactive emails and content, active customer support, attention to detail at every turn, and an experience to use for even the most simple user goals.
We obsessed over the texture of the ethernet cable. We deliberated endlessly over interactions. We crafted a user interface that literally breathing, showing it is alive and aware to optimize your home continuously.
The mobile interface was not a utility, it was an experience. I was honored to be part of a team brave enough to take such a stance to push beyond. We were intolerant to the mundane.
Most WiFi related products have been all about serving the user in the form of a direct utility, with knobs and toggles, port-forwarding fields and advanced functions — the idea that home networking could be more personable was scoffed as noise and decoration.
But home WiFi was only the beginning for Plume. We were building a platform for your digital home on the internet for not just connectivity, but the backbone of all digital experiences in family life. Our solution needed identity and relationship with end users — to instill integrity, confidence, companionship, and character.
Our interface was alive and conversational. The home screen featured the meditative, breathing, pod of your online network. It instilled calmness and confidence in the happy state that everything is working well. The system is alive and aware to adapt.
This AdaptiveWiFi™ behaved as a concierge in your hand. Greeting the user with good morning, afternoon, or nights. It bubbled up the most important timely information and allowed all other analysis to fall away to be accessed in the UI for further examination.
In 2016 - 2018, ISPs had very little insight into their own subscribers network health. They knew how much speed was being served, and how much bandwidth consumed — but hardly more than that.
This meant that ISPs only knew about problems when the customer support lines blew up, and often these were WiFi problems unrelated to their service.
Is the problem with interference from Neighbors? Node placement? Poor WiFi chips on a model of devices? Obstructions in the home such as pipes or appliances?
With Plume, the ISP can now manage and optimize the WiFi just as customers had always mistakenly assumed they were already doing.
This plus, ISPs could see network health all the way down to the final inches of service as it reaches the destination client device.
We designed multiple customer agent portals, web dashboards, and advanced ISP utilities to create a landscape of awareness and control that was previously unknown territory for ISPs.
With hardware, CSPs were enabled to roll out new services on the fly and without firmware updates. But that was still not the case for our end user consumer app.
As our platform was adopted by hundreds of CSPs around the world — along with most of the major ones like Comcast, Vodafone, etc. — there grew a need to provide these Communication Service Providers (CSPs) with end user interfaces that were as flexible for new service integration as our back-end systems.
We were already targeting an interface that could be hyper-modular and endlessly flexible to dynamic content.
Depending on a user's region, CSP internet provider, devices in the home, and even the weather, the Plume consumer app would tailor itself to the changing circumstances to be endlessly accommodating.
This new version was created during our rebrand in 2020 to help drive the cohesion of our identity.
With hardware, CSPs were enabled to roll out new services on the fly and without firmware updates. But that was still not the case for our end user consumer app.
As our platform was adopted by hundreds of CSPs around the world — along with most of the major ones like Comcast, Vodafone, etc. — there grew a need to provide these Communication Service Providers (CSPs) with end user interfaces that were as flexible for new service integration as our back-end systems.
We were already targeting an interface that could be hyper-modular and endlessly flexible to dynamic content.
Depending on a user's region, CSP internet provider, devices in the home, and even the weather, the Plume consumer app would tailor itself to the changing circumstances to be endlessly accommodating.
This new version was created during our rebrand in 2020 to help drive the cohesion of our identity.
Anyone who designs for emails knows: email clients suck. They are super limiting, can't do anything fancy, and have stifled a lot of innovation in the industry.
We had countless needs for email communications and they were coming from multiple audience types, multiple use cases — some product, some marketing, some legal/admin, and billing — and all of these requirements converged directly on my team.
We needed a solution that would be modular, scalable, easy to implement — but as always, in Plume fashion, they needed to be undeniably compelling and beyond simply looking pretty. At Plume, we created experiences above everything else.
With partnership from a few stakeholders internally, we launched on a effort to create a unified email system for all communications.
Our email system built with the new Plume brand was created to be open, flexible, and consistent.
Figma designs were completely modular and swappable — using on an atomic design system.
Responsiveness between desktop and mobile was not just capable, it was actually a feature in the experience of these emails.
A single email had a unique experience depending on whether it was viewed day or night, on mobile or desktop, and would reveal unique layouts and even data depending on these variables.
