Designing for check network status scalability
As a lead designer, I designed a flexible page template for Verizon's Check Network Status experience — and contributed the components back into the design system — so the team could launch network-event pages fast, consistently, and accessibly at scale
CONTEXT
Check Network Status is a high-traffic surface: when something goes wrong, this is where customers go to understand what's happening. During an event — an outage, planned maintenance, a localized disruption — Verizon needs to stand up a clear, trustworthy page fast, often under pressure, and it has to work across wireless and Fios and across every device.
The catch: a network event is not a one-off. There's always another one. So the real design problem wasn't "design this page" — it was "design the system that produces these pages."
THE PROBLEM
Designing each event page individually created three compounding issues:
Slow — every event meant starting from a blank file.
Inconsistent — small differences crept in page to page, eroding the trust the experience exists to build.
Fragile — accessibility and responsive behavior had to be re-solved each time, which is exactly how regressions sneak in.
At Verizon's scale and during the moments that matter most — a live outage — that combination is a real liability. The experience needed a system, not a series of bespoke pages.
WHAT I OWNED
I designed a reusable page template for the Check Network Status event experience and contributed its components into the design system so they were available beyond my own files. Concretely:
A flexible template that could express the range of event types and states the team needed — [list the real ones: e.g., active outage, resolved, maintenance, partial/regional, Fios-specific messaging] — from one structure.
Componentized building blocks — [the modules you built: e.g. status banner, event detail block, timeline/updates module, CTA patterns] — built with variants and auto-layout so they flex to real content without breaking.
System contribution — aligning these to Verizon's existing design system, [documenting usage / adding them to the shared library / defining the states and tokens], so other designers and engineers could reuse them.
Annotated, handoff-ready Figma maintained through Verizon's Visual Quality Assessment (VQA) process to hold the quality bar.
DESIGNING THE TEMPLATE
A few principles drove it:
Designed for the worst moment, not the average one. The template had to read clearly during a live outage, when a stressed customer wants one answer fast — so hierarchy and status messaging came first, everything else second.
Flex without breaking. Using variants and auto-layout, the modules absorbed real-world content — long event descriptions, multiple updates, Fios-specific messaging — without anyone having to redesign the layout. [Add a specific example of a tricky content case you solved.]
Accessibility built in, once. Solving color contrast, focus order, and responsive behavior inside the components meant every page built from them inherited it, instead of re-litigating it per page.
Consistency by default. If the fastest path for the next designer is also the on-system path, drift stops being a risk.
DESIGNING THE TEMPLATE
A few principles drove it:
Designed for the worst moment, not the average one. The template had to read clearly during a live outage, when a stressed customer wants one answer fast — so hierarchy and status messaging came first, everything else second.
Flex without breaking. Using variants and auto-layout, the modules absorbed real-world content — long event descriptions, multiple updates, Fios-specific messaging — without anyone having to redesign the layout. [Add a specific example of a tricky content case you solved.]
Accessibility built in, once. Solving color contrast, focus order, and responsive behavior inside the components meant every page built from them inherited it, instead of re-litigating it per page.
Consistency by default. If the fastest path for the next designer is also the on-system path, drift stops being a risk.
FINAL DESIGN
Check Network Status - Fios Home flow
IMPACT
• Enabled the launch of 12 network-event pages from one template, quickly and consistently.
Cut event-page production from [bespoke design each time] to [assembling from system components] — [add rough time saved if you can, e.g. "days to hours"].
Held consistency and accessibility across a surface serving ~1.2M monthly visits and ~850K monthly status checks, part of an experience that saved an estimated $1.7M annually in support costs.
COLLABORATION
What partners said.
Michael Mazzeo
Senior Manager, Experience Team — Verizon
Ajith Puppala
Dev Lead, PCT-55 & CNS Maps — Verizon