Coverage Planner

The five-minute decision

Helium Mobile is a consumer mobile carrier whose network grows through hotspots that people buy and install themselves. Every new deployer faces the same question before spending any money. Where should I put this, and is it worth it?

Answering that question well requires reading signal strength, existing coverage, reward history, on-chain activity and local user density, all at once, in a specific postcode. The raw data was all there. What was missing was a surface that could get a non-expert from curiosity to decision without burning an afternoon.

I led product design on the Coverage Planner, a web app built to be that surface.

Get a non-expert from curiosity to a confident deployment decision in under five minutes.

Density without clutter

The hard part of data-dense design is subtraction. Every data layer we shipped had to earn its place on a map already carrying terrain, roads and the user's own point of interest.

I grouped layers into three tiers: ambient context that is always on, decision-critical overlays surfaced by default for a given task, and power-user layers that the map hid until explicitly asked. That gave the interface three speeds: glance, read, analyse.

Onboarding around the jargon

Much of the audience was new to DePIN. A user could understand why they wanted better mobile coverage without wanting to learn how a decentralised wireless network compensates infrastructure providers.

I wrote the onboarding so that the product is usable with zero crypto vocabulary, and the vocabulary is available on tap for anyone who wants it. "Rewards" is a number; you can click through to see how the number is earned. Wallet connection is optional for browsing and only required at the point of ordering. Every jargon term links to a short, plain explanation.

Regulatory scrutiny on crypto-linked products was tightening at the same time, so the tone had to read as infrastructure, not speculation. No rocket ships. No moons.

UI that reads on a phone

Most planning started on desktop but plenty of the audience was out walking properties, phone in hand. The mobile pattern mirrors the desktop layout: boosted location sheet up top, map behind, key decision panels as drawers that do not fight the map for attention.

Plan, model, submit

Prospective deployers build a plan as a named draft, watch it model coverage asynchronously, and submit once they are confident. Plans accumulate in a personal list with their status visible at a glance.

• Figma
• React
• Mapbox
• TypeScript
• Solana

Working across timezones

The product team was split across the US and Ukraine. Design decisions lived in Figma, specs lived in a shared doc, and we ran a lightweight async loop so that neither side lost a day waiting for the other. Weekly live sessions were kept for the hard trade-offs. Everything else was written down.

Outcome

The Coverage Planner shipped as the default planning tool for prospective Helium Mobile deployers and became a core part of the network's growth story. The lesson I carried out was editorial: in a data-rich product, the hard design work is deciding what not to show.