Dear Giga,

I’ve been meaning to change my postpaid mobile plan to one of those no contract ones for a long time now and I made the switch to Giga a few days ago. People living in Singapore would know that the whole SIM-only hype started about 2 years ago following the swelling number of companies providing such services (e.g Circles.Life, GOMO, TPG), including Giga. This came as great news for many with commitment issues, including myself, because gone were the days where I had to wait 2 years before I could terminate my plan without suffering heavy financial penalties. A major reason for my switch was also the price factor — I previously paid about $70/month for 9GB of data whereas my new plan with Giga gives me 40GB of data for only $18/month.

I knew that the transfer process was rather fuss free because I’ve helped my family switch their telcos to GOMO and Giga and was rather pleased with the experience. All that had to be done was to fill out the necessary details online and a new SIM card would be sent over. The process would take only a few days and there was no need to customers to cancel their existing plan with their telco nor use a new number (Giga gives a temporary number for the port-over, then the old number could be used again once the transfer was done). I had a different experience and I would like to share about it here (at the same time make a user experience case study on it).

The Problem

It took me 2 days to complete a task that could have been completed in 30 seconds. Here’s why:

Upon the arrival of my SIM card, there were instructions on how to activate it which were fairly self explanatory:

1. Pop the SIM card into the phone and make sure WIFI is connected
2. Launch the giga app
3. Hit ‘activate’ and follow the instructions on the screen

I popped my SIM card into my phone and launched the app, but I didn’t see any ‘activate’ button. I closed and launched the app again, deleted and redownloaded, switched between my old SIM and the new SIM numerous times but still no button. Even though I had already received my new SIM, this was what I saw on the app’s Dashboard:

I started to suspect that the button didn’t appear because my delivery status was not confirmed yet — the status bar and the information displayed showed that my card was still on the way when I had already received it. The button was probably made to appear at the last stage of the status bar.

If this was true, I started looking around within to app to see if I could manually activate my card without waiting for the status of my delivery to be updated. I tried the FAQ first to find any information on how I could activate in any other way, to which I was given the same information as the card (shown above) that came together with my SIM:

And for the Nth time, there wasn’t any ACTIVATE button!!!!!! >:(

Next, I tried the Menu. Roaming/IDD and What’s Hot tabs were not relevant to solving my problems at this point of time because it shows information on the telco’s data roaming plan offerings and latest promotions respectively. Here’s what I saw when I tapped on Menu:

I tried each item on the menu and there were no options for me to manually activate the card on my own as well as to check on its status (whether it was activated or not). Sure, if I didn’t tap on the activate button then obviously my card couldn’t have been activated, right? Or is it? How was I supposed to know if my card hadn’t been somehow automatically (or accidentally) activated by myself or Giga? There was no way to verify this.

At this point of time, I had spent nearly an hour trying to activate my card was when it was something that could have been done within 30 seconds. I had no way to manually activate my new card and no way to know whether it was activated (if it was). I gave up and left them a message. The next morning, their staff confirmed that delivery guy hadn’t updated the status of the delivery, which was why there was no activate button. The team updated the delivery status for me and there was the godforsaken button. I was able to activate my SIM, and the Dashboard changed to this:

Most people would probably take this as confirmation that their plan has started, but I wasn’t satisfied. This didn’t exactly serve as an explicit confirmation that my card had been activated to me. Drawing from what I’ve learnt in the Visual Elements of User Interface Design course, people expect something in return for pressing a button. System messages or cues that confirms the user’s input has been received is always helpful, and reduces frustration. Some sort of feedback or explicit indication that my card was now activated would have reduced some user friction.

The Solution

This experience could have been better with the addition of 2 features: a menu item for manual card activation and an icon indicating the status of the number (inactive/active). I’m not really sure why the Menu items are arranged as such (as seen in Before), but it looked a little messy to me. I thought it would be neater for them to be in alphabetical order, so I did that too.

The only reason I can think of why Giga won’t allow manual activation on its app is to prevent users from accidentally activating their SIM when they’ve not received it yet. I think this is a legitimate concern since the bill cycle starts once the card has been activated. In that case, I think it would help for the SIM to come with a unique PIN number to allow users to activate their card without waiting on the delivery guy. If the SIM isn’t delivered to the rightful user, the PIN number cannot be used by someone else to manually activate the card (unless the other person is somehow logged into the owner’s Giga account).

After the user enters the correct PIN, the status bar next to the number would change from ‘inactive’ to ‘active’ which serves as an explicit cue/feedback for users to know that their line is live. It can look something like this:

Final thoughts

This short post details my experience of changing telcos and the roadblocks I faced along the way.

I think people nowadays are spoiled with so much good design (including me) that we don’t notice what’s good until we’ve experienced the not so good. I mentioned that I’ve previously helped my family switch telcos, and I remembered it was a rather seamless experience until I did the switch for myself. We tend to forget the good things but not the bad, and this experience clearly resonated with that.

p.s. not hating on Giga and it’s not that the experience was entirely horrible. The delivery of the SIM was fast and the staff were really pleasant, I just thought if the suggested features were implemented, it would have reduced the friction and enhanced the user experience!