Falling through the cracks of anticipated user behaviour.
I suppose it’s the job of anyone involved in user experience design to wax lyrical about good and poor experiences, so here’s mine.
Last weekend my father received a new sim from EE. He’d negotiated his monthly contract down to £6, which obviously required a new SIM card.
As the diligent son who works in IT, I was happy to help him set the SIM up on the EE website. To set the scene my father lives 100 miles away in a 17th century cottage that was designed to resist border raiders and any radio wave. He’s also decided that technology ceased being useful when manual chokes stopped being the norm on cars.
With me on my Mac, and my father on his old phone we began. The first hurdle was entering the SIMs serial number. The number (as stated) is either a 12 digit, or a 14 digit number, however the number is supplied was a 12 digit number with 2 trailing numbers within brackets thus;
123456789123(12).
Now is that a 12 digit, or 14 digit number? The fixed field length of the input field accept 14 chars, so it’s pot luck whether its the first 12 numbers, or all the integers minus the brackets. Why not accept the whole thing, and remove the brackets automagically?
However this isn’t the action that’s bricked my phone. My father is either technically or operationally unable to receive (read?) a text message, so the action of entering a phone number to receive a PIN number wasn’t going to work here. I decided to use my phone to receive the PIN number, a testament to the efficiency of the mobile network is that my phone only worked for a few minutes, before the SIM was locked.
Help please
I make so few phone calls that I didn’t notice my phone was dead, It was only when a friend mentioned a very nice chat he’d had with my dad when dialling my number did a sickening feeling start. My phone says ‘no service’, no bars of signal — I assume this means I can’t even make an emergency call?
A call to EE support, reset my phone, switched networks, and I utterly failed to describe what had happened. Then I discover that I’ve no authority to do anything as it’s a company phone.
A second call to EE support, resulted in the agreement, that I was indeed a diligent son doing his dad a favour during a pandemic, however I’d totally buggered my phone, and was not the contract signatory…
After chasing through my works very helpful ‘people’ manager, IT support, I end up talking to CEO (who was highly amused), and finally I’ve ended up with finance offering to cancel the direct debit for the phone, so as to trigger a nasty letter, which will have the account number on it, and enable us to resolve this problem.
The astute among you will have realised that there’s a simple old-school solution here. My father is now requesting a new SIM (cost £1.60) and he’s posting me the SIM that associated with my work number. I now owe him a pint, and will have to endure his eternal derision.
And so..
I don’t think I could build a service that could have trapped this issue happening. The content design on the EE site is poorly written, I assume the service didn’t anticipate the scenario above, and when I help design happy-path service journeys, I glibly assume that customer support will pick up the stragglers.
If only the SIM setup process had said; ‘make sure you use the new phone and SIM when doing the task’ and I’d read it.
I’ve fallen through the crack that occur when services meet, patently SIM cards and even phone numbers are pretty anachronistic. My identity isn’t, nor should it be tied to physical items. I expect my identity (Google, Apple, Microsoft etc) to be platform independent and portable. I am often assigned GOV specific hardware, and once I’ve wrestled through their authentication methods, I can access (for instance) Slack in the browser, and continue working.
