How many times have you had the urge to smash your phone just because App that worked yesterday doesn’t work anymore? or it says “system under maintenance” just when you are in dire need to reload your account. These apps don’t function properly as well as poorly designed. As a Sri Lankan I come across many poorly designed mobile applications throughout my day. Yet the majority of the users don’t mind this and they’ve adapted themselves to the app and not the other way. Those are just tools to ease our workflow, so they must be built to last. Being a designer, I can’t help myself to point out the flaws I see. So here’s a written version of my rants.
First Culprit is “Mobitel Selfcare” app by Mobitel. It’s simply an all-in-one app enabling users to control their mobile package. You can reload, activate plans etc. It’s a convenient app made to ease the workflow of users instead of going online to activate a package. But many questions lie within the design of the app itself. From the on-boarding to the way settings are placed are somewhat of a chaos. Disclaimer that this is entirely my view as a designer and this isn’t meant to be universal. Take me as a person who likes to see quality products rather than some rectangles put together and call it an app.
On-boarding process
Current on-boarding process include a screen to select a language, which I appreciate. The fact that it has a separate screen let users to digest slowly without a hassle, After you select a language and proceed you arrive at a place where I see a chinatown. Terms & conditions, a page we usually ignore. What I’ve done differently here is that give user the option of viewing the Terms & Conditions or not, it makes sure that they are in control. And the design of T&C screen is a joke, even if a user tries to view/read it, It certainly creates this imaginary barrier attempting to keep the user away from scrolling till the end. So the next one is verification process which is quite straight forward. I’d rate this process 4/10.
Home screen
Overall a pretty good/solid structure, and why there’s a side-bar instead a navigation-bar like any other app. I mean if they’ve trying to be creative and took a novel approach, kudos to them actually. It’d have been much better if they’ve executed it more close to perfection or better than average. What I see is redundancy of elements, in both side-bar and the home-screen as well. It’s like they’ve run out of elements to put in and put randoms things there. If it were to be a good app there should be a flow, I don’t see that here.
What I’d done differently is that Add a navigation bar and categorize them into different pages like Home, Services, Settings etc. Then it’d be far easier to navigate through the app.
Then onto the Main content, first we see a package promotion/ advertisement. It’s just a image which is hard to read, and most likely a JPEG, you can see the white edges as well. Who’d click this? if not for a misclick I don’t think anyone with a sane mind would dare to click this. They really should’ve analyze heat maps of the app and will conclude that for sure. My suggestion is that take some of the use of space more and design them more clickable, Add a CTA button to make it more immersive.
Then we see a account details, it’s more straight-forward nothing to add there. Next the status of the account; balance, data, calls etc. Instead of two separate boxes for balance and data/calls I’d suggest a single container prioritizing balance. User can switch tabs to see amount of data remaining.
Then it’s Quick Actions and Other apps, I’d keep some most used actions(maybe only 3) and others at a separate screen that a user can navigate through the navigation-bar.
I'd again rate this whole screen 4/10.
That concludes my quick rant on On-boarding and Home-screen of Mobitel selfcare App. Feel free to share your thoughts.