CREATING A BETTER DASHBOARD EXPERIENCE
FOR HOLOGRAM’S NEW HYPER SIMS

Hologram’s new Hyper SIMs offer a global solution for the IoT industry, providing modern connectivity for any IoT device.
Customers across various industries use the platform to ensure reliable connectivity and efficient usage and billing management.

MY ROLE

Led the discovery and validation research, strategy and design.

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

How do we best support our largest customers receiving these new SIMs? What are their top concerns?

DEFINING A RESEARCH PLAN

We weren’t sure where to start so step one was to conduct discovery research.

Then we could answer how customers manage devices with our current offering today? And we could investigate any shortcuts, workarounds, or pain points they’re running into and how those encounters impact fleet size.

At this step in the process, I started sketching ideas, and we wrote a rough draft conversation guide and shared it with internal stakeholders. We partnered with customer-facing teams to identify qualified participants. We worked with engineering and shared early mock-ups allowing us to capture feedback and adapt to engineering constraints.

With product and UX discovery research we hope to answer:

• Insights, themes, pain points, and opportunities

• Segmentation: How do customers think about groups within their fleet?

• Selection: Could advanced filtering and selection with dynamic actions create a better experience?

• Advanced filtering: Will advanced customization features allow for better integration?

• Up next and future feature prioritization

• Global search concept

Participant requirements:

Already onboarded technical and nontechnical customers, in several different industries with larger fleets (10,000+ devices). Ideally we would like to connect with customers who have reached out to our support team and that utilize some aspects of our API.

Research deliverables:

We crafted a conversation guide and clickable prototype that featured search flows and wireframe screens of segmentation, selection, and filtering

(Above): Early mock-ups evolved after multiple rounds of engineering feedback and investigations into technical constraints. We removed the footer component and the status dots (left of the device name) in the results list modal because of the delay in data from our connectivity partners.

This helped to eliminate any confusion around the current state of a device’s connectivity status (showing up as paused in a search but in an active data session once the user clicks into and arrives at the single device page)

CUSTOMER CONVERSATION TAKEAWAYS

Customers expressed that finding devices quickly is top of mind when troubleshooting connectivity

We learned that there is no norm for how customers use identifiers to link their system to ours (more on this later)

The new global search UI performed well and customers understood how to navigate to devices easily

Table customization, pagination, and more filtering capabilities were mentioned as expected features compared to our competitors

Bulk management was was a feature requested by all customers we spoke with

Customers are depending on Hologram to identify cost saving measures

Maintaining connectivity uptime is equally as important to customers as understanding and managing costs

Customers expressed confusion around our data limit terminology 

TECHNICAL INNOVATION

Backup connectivity and automatic network fallback, while a huge value to our customers, meant a new approach to how we’ll need to surface search results.

HYPER SIMs’ sophisticated technology can store multiple connectivity profiles on one SIM for maximum coverage flexibility. 

These SIMs can detect network outages and are advanced enough to automatically switch profiles in minutes, not hours or days, without replacing physical SIM cards.

Profiles exist on eSIMs, allowing network fallback and premium globally redundant coverage. Profiles are downloaded and activated over the air. When this happens, specific unique identifiers (used to identify devices in the Hologram system) are replaced and updated based on the new active profile.

CUSTOMER iMPACT

We heard from our support teams that customers were reporting missing devices after profile swaps.

Our past research determined that our customers are using many different identifiers to link their systems to Hologram. Do customers understand multiple profiles’ impact when setting up and growing their fleets? Where else in our dashboard might need to be updated for clarity? We must discuss with customers and look at not just search but usage, billing, and device exports.

Currently our dashboard backend only supports:  
one device : one ICCID relationship

Introducing Hyper eUICCIDs allows for: 
one device : many ICCID relationships

(Below) in the dashboard, here is an example of how our filter side bar and the device export would have to account for this new relationship.

RESEARCHING a NEW SOLUTION

Our new goal was to deliver trusted search results and clear value proposition to customers. We also wanted to decrease messages to support about missing SIMs.

We wanted to speak to onboarded customers new to Hyper SIMs or had reached out recently to our customer support team.

We hope that product and UX discovery research will help answer:

• Usability of new global search

• If customers can interpret historical data in the search results and navigate successfully?

• How are they managing devices with a profile swap?

• Gauge use and knowledge of different SIM IDs

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

Research deliverables

Again we had a conversation guide with three search related tasks and a bonus terminology activity that we walked customers through. We made continuous improvements to a clickthrough prototype featuring customer education on search result ID matches.

Process:

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

(Below): Capturing screens from billing statements, usage reports, activity logs, anywhere you could download a .csv with device details, site-wide tooltips, and multi-step processes like activation and pausing devices to provide and record a list of features and enhances could be made to support the future of Hyper SIMs in the dashboard.

(Below, left to right): Exploring a high-fidelity mock-up with new AI that only displays pertinent profile history information in the Hyper tab, building a first-time Hyper customer prototype for use in the four research studies. Themes and customer quotes were tagged in research transcripts in Dovetail to support the research findings document.

(Below): Conversation guide used during our four research sessions, research prototype

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Global search user interface performed great

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 

SOLUTIONS APPENDIX: