A BETTER DASHBOARD EXPERIENCE

Phase 2: MVP to validated final solution

Customers across various industries utilize Hologram’s platform to manage connectivity, monitor efficient usage and billing.
In this phase of the project, new technology innovation meant updating our platform, starting with Search.

 
 

MY ROLE

Led the discovery and validation research, strategy and design for our largest customers.

COLLABORATORS

4 Engineers   ·   1 Engineering manager   ·   1 Product Manager   ·   8 Customers

Throughout the project, I partnered with our design systems team, other product designers, content design, and product stakeholders.

THE PROBLEM

Search results felt broken and incorrect leaving customers unsure about result reliability.

An increase in missing devices reports were coming in to our customer support teams.

Hologram Hyper SIM cards, using new eUICC technology, gave customers seamless backup connectivity and automatic network fallback providing redundant reliable network access.

While super valuable to customers, this new tech also brought with it some technical challenges related to identifying devices in our dashboard. Our backend needed to support a one to many relationship in order to meet customer expectations.

Click to learn how we solved Search up to this point.


EUICC DETAILS

Hologram Hyper SIMs can detect network outages and are advanced enough to automatically switch connectivity profiles in minutes, not hours or days, because there are multiple connectivity profiles stored on an eUICC SIM.

These profiles are downloaded and activated over the air. When this happens specific IDs, used throughout our platform for device identification, are replaced and updated based on the new active profile.

IDs associated with a SIM:

  • ICCID (18–22 digit Integrated Circuit Card ID)

  • Link ID

  • IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity)

  • MSISDN (Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number): A phone number assigned to the IoT SIM (country code plus phone number; see below

  • Device ID (7 digit number generated by Hologram upon activation)

  • IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identifier)

  • eUICCID or eSIM (32 digit number, containing information that identifies the SIM supplier as well as acting as a global unique identifier for the physical SIM)

Our past research told us customers aren’t using a consistent ID to link their systems to Hologram. Most use ICCID but some, depending on their businesses might use device names or Link ID. If those IDs are replaced by enabling a new profile, customers will not be able to find their devices in the dashboard.

Our dashboard backend only supports
one device : one ID relationship

—

But we needed to allow for
one device : many ID relationships

RESEARCH

Before we got started building a solution… We needed to understand how other parts of the platform like usage and billing pages or device exports might be impacted. Do customers understand the impact to device management with eUICC technology? We wanted to speak to onboarded customers new to Hyper SIMs or folks who had reached out to our customer support team.

 

Research goals:

  • Deliver trusted search results to customers.

  • Decrease messages to support about missing SIMs.

  • Understand if customers need historical information about swaps.

  • Learn how customers are tracking profile swaps internally.

  • Gauge use and knowledge of different SIM IDs / Hyper technology

  • Validate customer facing terminology (Active, disabled, enabled, profiles etc.)

MY PROCESS

I conducted an entire platform audit first, to understand where else multiple identifiers could impact current and historical device data across our customer segments. 

I captured screens from billing statements, usage reports, activity logs, anywhere you could download a .csv with device details, tooltips, and multi-step processes like activation and pausing devices.

Here is an example of how our filter side bar and the device export .csv would need to evolve with this new relationship. Device details in pink are using current enabled profile data on the SIM while the blue filters are profile agnostic.

Finished the conversation guide to use during customer research sessions. This document included links to the research tasks.

I built the prototype for our customer research sessions with Figma. Themes and customer quotes were tagged in research transcripts in Dovetail and I turned our research findings into a an insights document shared internally.

 

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Global search user interface updates performed really well
Customers understood how new IDs related to profiles and were consistently able to find new devices, even after IDs changed
Customers could speak to the value of eUICC devices 
Customers were aligned with the term "Active" to represent enabled profiles 
We learned that Elastic search  would  power these needed user experience updates

 

SOLUTION APPENDIX

BUSINESS & CUSTOMER IMPACT:

We decreased messages to support from 10 per week to zero! 
We created scalable search solution that launched to customers in the spring of 2022
We delivered trusted and clear results to customers needing to locate devices quickly

UP NEXT: PHASE 1

Click to learn how we went from Discovery research to a Search MVP.