Empowering customers to independently activate their SIMs

Team

Year

2022

Sr. Product Designers

Julien Nguyen / Teresa Jimmerson

Sr. Product Managers

Kayla McDermott / Leslie Hall

Director of Product Design

Sean Nelson

Duration

6 Months

Engineer Manager

Ben Fallon

Lead Engineers

Dan Van Eck / Ben Crowder

Senior Engineers

Ben Gimbel / Becki Blumer

Overview

Hologram is a SaaS telecom startup based in Chicago, IL that provides hardware (SIM cards), software, and IoT cellular data services tailored for small to medium-sized businesses.

As a member of the Growth team, my objective was to overhaul the SIM activation process, placing particular emphasis on enhancing the experience for first-time users. Additionally, I worked closely with our Core team, which was concurrently engaged in redesigning the activation flow for returning users.

Through limited user testing with several key customers, we discovered that the designs we delivered appeared to be well-received by our intended users. However before I could collect additional post-release data, my role was unfortunately impacted by RIF.

Background

Hologram’s business can be roughly summarized as selling internet access for devices operated by SMBs through the resale and management of SIM cards on our network. Although customers can obtain SIMs from a variety of sources, we recommended our customers to purchase through us for full compatibility.

One important milestone in the customer journey involves activating their first SIM card on our network, as data showed that users who successfully completed this task were more than 70% likely to convert as a paying (contract) customer.

Self-Service & Contracted Customers

Hologram customers can be broadly categorized into two groups: self-service and contracted customers.

Self-service customers, though not well-documented, generally exhibit certain traits. They usually prefer simpler data plans limited to their region, activate 1-30 SIMs, and are typically in the testing or validation stage of their business. Self-Service customers could range from being a small to mid-sized company all the way down to a tech enthusiast tinkering with a Raspberry Pi device.

On the other hand, contracted customers provide more information as we have direct communication with them. They typically look for personalized data plans, activate more than 50 SIMs, and are either concluding testing, scaling for launch, or expanding into new regions. Contracted customers are typically more established/mature organizations compared to early-stage startups or individuals.

First-Time & Returning Users

In terms of first-time and returning users in relation to self-service and contracted, it can get somewhat tricky. First-time users almost always fall into the self-service category, but not all self-service users are first-time users.

In contrast, contracted customers are almost exclusively returning users because of their available customized data plans (i.e. most users validate our service with our preselect plans first before contracting and implementing custom data plans).

Goals

Whether a self-service or contracted customer is just getting started or adding additional devices to their fleet, getting SIM cards activated is the first step — and it should be easy and fast. We wanted to help customers spend less time on set up and more time on project deployment.

Originally you could only activate your SIM cards by manually entering in each serial number on the back of each invidividual SIM or contacting our support team (that comprised of multiple back-and-forth conversations with Sales Engineers and AEs) to help with batch activations.

This flow's deficiency in distinguishing between the experiences of first-time and returning users, coupled with the absence of significant updates in over several years, highlighted the need for a thorough revisit of this feature.

1. Legacy Dashboard-First Time & Returning/Default view;2. Legacy Activation Flow-(clockwise) steps 1-3;3. Legacy Activation Flow-Review

By empowering customers through a redesigned SIM onboarding experience, customers can complete a variety of activation tasks to our network in mere minutes. Our aim was to make the activation experience seamless and user-friendly, not only to minimize the time customers spent onboarding but also to set us apart from competitors when evaluating our product.

The biggest challenge for this project was the fact that our organization planned to design and launch in tandem two distinct activation flows: one for first-time users (our Growth team) and the other for returning users (Core team) that typically activated large amounts of SIMs at once.

What we focused on
What we measured

  • Task completion rate for individuals commencing activation process

  • Lower customer success tickets regarding activation

Contributions

Collaborative Strategies

Although it made sense to execute these activation flows at the same time, it did bring up unique challenges that required our teams to coordinate much closer together to maintain consistency and alignment between these two similar tracks.

Despite seemingly linear in design, there were ample permutations and variations embedded within this flow that could trigger a variety of responses or error states depending on what combination of selections were made. This feature also had poor historical documentation which made it difficult for us to fully understand all the variations of edge/error states needed to document until our team discovered them through implementation or QA.

As layouts and/or copy could easily change with each new edge case discovery, we had to make sure that all lines of communication were open and we set up more frequent check-ins and rituals to support this cross-team collaboration:

Discovery & Ideations

Initially, I examined various approaches to tackle this flow in partnership with the product designer within the Core team (e.g. should this be within a modal; should we progressively show steps via expand/collapse dropdowns; should we show current and pending steps; should first-time be a unique flow compared to returning).

1. V1 Variations2. V2 Variations3. V3 Variations4. Wireframe Iterations Overview

I wasn’t able to validate my ideations/explorations with our users given the challenges in identifying proper candidates however I did collaborate and leverage qualitative findings from our Core team (which was much easier to find testing candidates) that helped refine our overall design direction towards a unified approach.

“ Overage and overage limits are confusing since all data is considered overage ”

customer feedback

Themes that we wanted to incorporate post-research include:

Activation Process

Originally we looked into creating a dedicated page to support these flows the previous method of using a modified modal didn't seem to be appropriate. However, due to limitations on incorporating a page to support these actions, we had to resort to a "emulated" page by forcing a modal to take over the entire viewport.

We also had to cognizant that our engineers would be tapping into the same back-end process that every other team member (Customer Success/AEs) currently used to activate SIMs for this project, which meant that we needed to adhere to not only all the steps but support all the variations, edge, exception, and error states that could occur.

1. Deliverables Overview-Over 100 combined states documented between both releases;2. Variation/Edge Case Examples-SIM Selection3. Variation/Edge Case Examples-Usage Limits4. Copy Revision Workshop5. Copy Annotations6. UI Workshops-Discussing and defining new UI components such as toggles for our design system

For the first-time plan selection, I leveraged large affordances and iconography from another onboarding project I designed to help make this step feel more consistent and approachable. For returning users, we agreed that users could opt to either select a pre-defined plan offered to first-time users or select a customized plan if they already were contracted.

SIM selection was rehauled to provide much more functionality, adding support to activate both individual SIMs by serial number or batch SIMs via serial number ranges and CSV.

Newly productized features with the activation process also resolved several key customer requests: data limits and auto-refill options were more clearly presented to reduce service interruption and/or billing inquiries while custom prefix/tagging allowed customers to maintain and organize their fleet of devices more efficiently from the activation stage.

1. Prelimary View & Loading-First Time & Returning/Default view;2. Plan Selection & SIM Addition3. Usage Limits & Auto Refill4. Payment & Review

Results

We again sought input from the testing pool within our Core team to gather validation insights. The feedback from customers was overwhelmingly positive, instilling confidence in us as we moved towards the launch phase.

“ Excited overall for more ways to activate SIMs, outside of the API ”

validation feedback

One piece of constructive critique that we learned from these validation sessions was the potentially long names when choosing a SIM plan for returning customers. As plan names are generated based on selections (Company Name / Data Plan / Coverage), these names could get exceedingly long when supporting multiple regions:

Although this wasn't deemed as a dealbreaker for this release, we did plan to look into revising how plan names are generated (including what we should be disclosed to allow discoverability) in a subsequent update.

Our plan was to fully launch both features "overnight," with a backup plan to revert to the previous flows in case of significant drop-offs in activation attempts. Although the initial numbers showed promise(~10% improvement on activation completion; ~15% lower customer support tickets), my role was unexpectedly affected by Reduction in Force (RIF) before we could conduct a more comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of our launched designs.

Reflections

Although challenging, I was incredibly proud of what we were able to accomplish for this feature, especially as this was one of the most complex projects that I’ve worked on in my product design career.

  • We unanimously agreed that we definitely bit off more than we could chew for this feature. During our retro we agreed that this project should have been divided up into multiple phases, specifically: a more thorough engineering spike; dedicated IA documentation stage; and decoupling copy revisions for a separate release.

  • Our fantastic product managers were able to facilitate a very transparent and supportive environment during the design and developmental process, encouraging team members to speak openly and frankly regarding any roadblocks, potential conflicts, or discoveries that might affect any product or roadmap change. This allowed our team to work more confidently and without fear through ambiguity.

  • Despite all of the numerous setbacks in delivering this feature, one great thing about this experience was seeing how communication, collaboration, and kindness goes such a long way in how you respond to these challenges. I was able to overcome these potential setbacks by listening first and working together on how to find a solution that would solve both user needs while balancing a realistic deliverable timeframe.