# Tre: B2B telecom self-service platform **Client:** Tre **Year:** 2023 – present **Role:** Product & UX Designer **URL:** https://www.afekenst.am/case/tre-nordic-business-admin-portal --- ## Outcome Designed the core interaction model and information architecture for Tre's first B2B self-service platform, serving business customers across Sweden and Denmark. MVP launched in 2025 after two years of iterative design and development. --- ## Context Tre is one of the largest mobile operators in Scandinavia. Their business customers were using the same consumer self-service portal as individual users, a platform designed for managing a single subscription. It offered basic cost center management, but lacked what business customers actually needed: role-based access, tiered permissions, and bulk administration across accounts. For anything beyond the basics, they relied on customer service calls, manual processes, and workarounds. The goal was a self-service platform built specifically for B2B. One that could handle complex account structures, role-based permissions, and subscription management across two markets with different regulatory and product requirements. I joined as the first designer on the project and was the sole designer for most of it, collaborating with two other designers in periods. --- ## Challenge The core difficulty was range. A small business owner managing three phones and an enterprise IT admin managing 500 subscriptions with tiered permissions both needed to use the same platform. The interface had to work across that span without becoming too simple for power users or too dense for smaller accounts. The platform also had to work across two markets (Sweden and Denmark) with different subscription models, different legal requirements, and different customer expectations, all on a single codebase and design system. A third constraint: this was a data-heavy administration tool that also needed to work on mobile. Most competitor platforms treat mobile as an afterthought for enterprise self-service. That wasn't an option here. --- ## Approach Edge cases first. I started design and validation with the most complex customer scenarios (large accounts, unusual permission structures, cross-market cases) instead of the happy path. If the system could handle the hardest cases cleanly, simpler ones would work by default. Starting with common scenarios and adding complexity later would have meant constant rework. Research through pilot customers. I set up a research loop with a small group of pilot customers, combining quantitative analytics from early usage with qualitative feedback from onboarding sessions and direct testing. Insights from the Swedish market were compared against Danish customer needs to find shared patterns and market-specific exceptions. Responsive breakpoints as a design constraint. I mapped six breakpoints early and designed key flows at each simultaneously, instead of designing for desktop first and adapting down. The subscription detail view, the most information-dense screen, was the stress test. If it worked at mobile width, the rest of the system would hold. Progressive disclosure for variable complexity. The platform surfaces only what's relevant to the current account's scale and permissions. A three-person business sees a simplified view. An enterprise admin sees the full administration layer. The underlying data model is the same; the interface adapts based on account context. --- ## Impact The MVP launched in 2025 and is being used by pilot customers. The platform replaced manual, service-dependent processes with direct self-service for subscription management, user administration, and cost control. Specific outcomes from the pilot phase: [add any metrics you have: reduced support calls, task completion rates, onboarding time, customer satisfaction scores, number of pilot accounts, etc.] The design system and component library built for this project also became the foundation for Tre's broader B2B product design language. --- ## Reflections Two years on a single product with a small team, working close to engineering, iterating in short loops, and pushing for real customer feedback to drive decisions. Balancing stakeholder priorities with customer needs was a constant challenge. Internal requirements and customer realities didn't always align, and that tension was part of the work throughout. The edge-cases-first approach shaped a system built to handle complexity from the start. The real test will be whether it scales down just as cleanly when smaller customers begin using it. --- ## Static exports - Markdown: https://www.afekenst.am/exports/tre-nordic-business-admin-portal-case.md - HTML: https://www.afekenst.am/exports/case-html/tre-nordic-business-admin-portal.html - Interactive case: https://www.afekenst.am/case/tre-nordic-business-admin-portal - Full portfolio: https://www.afekenst.am/llms-full.txt