Musings in Four Dimensions
Musings in Four Dimensions
In the first quarter of 2016 (early February 2016, to be precise), the lines of communication had re-opened between MobileAware and an MVNO (MVNO = Mobile Virtual Network Operator… basically it's a network operator that doesn't actually own the network it uses. Like how Cricket uses the AT&T network here in the US) in the United Kingdom - Talkmobile. Talkmobile's subscriber base is primarily pre-paid customers, those who purchase prepaid cards to top-up their accounts and whatnot. Their project seemed pretty straight forward for myself and the MobileAware design team, however...
The Talkmobile project (or "enablement" to use the MobileAware vernacular) unofficially kicked-off with a visual "proof of concept" - both the technical leads in MobileAware and the execs at Talkmobile were curious to see how the product app would look for Talkmobile. With this unofficial kickoff, the design team set out gathering information on what [Talkmobile's] user base is, as well as gathering any known technical/business information we already had access to. This yielded a very "stripped-down" design… and, consequently, what would be a very small "enablement" - as the services were limited, and it proved to be difficult accessing them without quite a bit of help from Talkmobile themselves.
With that said, we were able to forge a very clean and simple design, which we felt would be the best design for their users to interact with. The designs and overall enablement has been complete since September of 2016, the Integration Platform team is still waiting on more services (as well as more stable services for the ones we know to have access to). Hopefully, once the services are in place and integrated, the Talkmobile enablement of the MobileAware product will see use by Talkmobile's subscribers.