Skinny Jump
Project
Skinny Jump
Client
Skinny Mobile
Designing for every dollar
Skinny Jump is New Zealand's largest digital-inclusion programme — subsidised prepaid broadband for households that can't afford a connection. I led the design of its app: the tool families use to get online, stay online, and never be surprised by a bill. Shipped 2021, on both app stores.
100,000 households connected by the programme over its first decade
$5 → 35GB — data managed to the dollar
Shipped — App Store & Google Play, 2021
01
THE PROBLEM
The internet has a paywall
At the last Census, roughly 170,000 New Zealand households had no internet at home; InternetNZ estimates around 400,000 lack meaningful digital access. The barrier is overwhelmingly cost, and it compounds: no connection means no online banking, no school portal, no job applications.
Skinny Jump attacks this with heavily subsidised prepaid broadband, a 4G modem, no installation, no contract, no credit check, $5 for 35GB, distributed through community partners like libraries. My brief: design the app that Jump households use to activate their modem, top up, and manage their data.
The users are, by definition, people the industry usually designs around: limited budgets, often limited digital confidence, sometimes no bank card, sometimes a first-ever home connection. Every standard telco-app assumption had to be re-examined.
02
Research
Profiles of real households, not market segments
We started with interviews in the homes and communities Jump serves, building user profiles from real lives rather than the business's plan structure. What shaped the design:
1. Data is money, and money is counted daily. For Jump households a data balance isn't telemetry, it's this week's budget. Surprise depletion is a genuine harm. The app leads with the balance, always current, always in plain language: how much is left, and what it costs to add more.
2. The first session is the hardest. For some families this app is the first step of their first home internet connection. Modem activation had to work for someone who has never configured anything, guided, forgiving, jargon-free.
03
DESIGN DECISIONS
Simplicity as respect
Balance first, always. The home screen answers the question that matters most: "how much data do we have left?". Renewals are one tap from the answer.
Cash-friendly by design. Voucher top-up sits alongside card payment as an equal path. Credit gifting lets whānau support each other's connections.
Onboarding for the first-time connected. Activation walks users from "find the number on the back of your modem" to a working connection in plain steps, with nothing assumed.
Bending the brand toward accessibility. Skinny's brand is loud, iconic orange, bold type, playful vector illustration. Applied raw, parts of it failed contrast and legibility for this audience. We kept the personality but adapted the system: adjusted colour applications for contrast, larger type and touch targets, simplified illustration in functional contexts. Where brand guidelines and accessibility conflicted, accessibility won, with the brand team's buy-in, because we could show why. The result still reads unmistakably Skinny; it just works for everyone.
04
OUTCOMES
The app behind a national programme
The Skinny Jump app shipped to both app stores in March 2021 and remains the self-service front door for the programme's households today.
The programme it serves (stats are Skinny/Spark's, as of the programme's 10-year milestone, August 2026):
100,000 households have accessed Skinny Jump over the past decade
~35,000 households currently connected
418 million GB of subsidised data delivered
Reaching one in five NZ households that lack home internet
$9.1M in subsidised broadband value in FY2025 alone
Designing the self-service tool for a programme like this means the design quality isn't a nicety, every confused user who can't top up is a family offline.
