CityFibre
Laying the foundations for the next generation of fibre broadband.
CityFibre are a telecoms service provider on a mission to transform the internet as we know it. By rolling out a vast network of fibre optic up and down the country, they're empowering countless businesses & consumers across the UK to benefit from what they call 'full fibre'.
- Services
- Design System
- UX/UI Design
- UI Development
- Technologies
Figma
Craft CMS
The full fibre difference
While CityFibre are hardly the first provider to offer fibre broadband in the UK, they are one of a select few whom exclusively offer Fibre to the Premises - also known as FTTP - to their customers.
Why is this important? Well, imagine for a moment that your daily commute (back when that was more or less a regular thing) involved a high-speed rail link. By far the most efficient method of intercity travel, you would find yourself in the envious position of spending the majority of your journey travelling almost twice as fast as the national speed limit. However, unless you're hip enough to actually live inside your local train station, you'd also need to factor in the problem of getting to & from the train in the first place; whether walking, cycling, or roller-skating (you get all sorts in London), the first & last mile(s) of your journey are bound to be the slowest.
There's fibre, and then there's "full fibre".
Unbeknownst to many, much of our broadband infrastructure works in a similar way. The vast majority of fibre broadband services offered in the UK use highly efficient fibre optic cable to transmit data between the telephone exchange and the cabinet, but the connection between this cabinet and the customer's premises relies on traditional copper cabling, which simply can't match the performance of fibre. Despite this, it is often dubiously marketed alongside superior 'full fibre' services, which offer an uninterrupted fibre optic connection directly from the telephone exchange to the premises.
One of the ways in which we helped communicate this difference was by way of an interactive infographic, which encourages users to toggle between a sample of the various broadband packages offered by leading ISPs and discover how their choice affects the potential connection speed.
Define once, use everywhere.
To establish visual consistency between different user flows, a design system was established early on and further developed in response to new & evolving requirements. Using a shared library within our Figma project enabled us to define our repeatable UI patterns and brand styles in a centralised location, while retaining the ability to use these assets within our work-in-progress documents and have them automatically update when they are changed at the source.
Crafting an editor-first experience.
The previous site was powered by Wordpress and suffered from numerous performance and usability issues, owing to the large number of third-party plugins that were relied upon even for the most basic functionality.
Replatforming to Craft CMS allowed us to natively define the content model ourselves, allowing us to provide a far superior experience to content editors tasked with making routine updates to the site. One significant improvement was the new ability to compose pages from reusable content blocks, rather than being constrained by Wordpress' traditional RTF editor.
