T-Mobile’s eSIM e-commerce experience.
Before the iPhone 14, the first iPhone to ship eSIM-only, T-Mobile’s activation flow was losing customers at IMEI entry, device verification, and every fragmented step in between. We rewrote the experience around clarity instead of instruction.
Four numbers, all moving the same direction.
What it meant for the business: lower dependency on retail and phone support, faster adoption of a lower-cost digital product, and stronger first-time success that compounds into retention.
Users dropped off the moment the flow stopped explaining itself.
Users attempting to activate eSIM struggled with unclear system feedback, fragmented steps, and missing guidance at the exact moments they needed it. The result was a flow with three compounding failure modes:
- High abandonment during IMEI entry and device verification.
- Increased reliance on customer support and retail assistance.
- Lost conversions for a high-value digital product.
Three patterns kept showing up
Critical confusion around eSIM. 4 out of 5 customers didn’t know what an eSIM was, and many weren’t sure how to confirm their device supported it, so they hesitated, second-guessed, or made errors that broke the flow.
Multi-step friction. The journey spanned multiple pages owned by different teams, with inconsistent feedback. Cognitive load piled up; uncertainty did the rest.
No contextual guidance. Terms like IMEI and EID were never explained in plain language. Users were left to translate jargon at the worst possible moment.
Product Designer, splitting the surface with a senior designer.
I worked as a Product Designer embedded at T-Mobile from WongDoody, splitting design responsibilities with a senior designer across the eSIM onboarding experience.
Cross-functional partners
A copywriter on every screen of microcopy. UX researchers on what to test, and how. A product owner pushing for clarity on scope. The work shipped because the loop between those four roles was tight.
What I owned
User flows, interaction design, and content structure across BYOD, MyTMO, and the new-purchase journey, each with different ownership boundaries and different constraints.
Where the existing flow lost people.
One signal shaped how I read everything else: people who reach the BYOD page are already serious, either switching to T-Mobile as a new customer or swapping a SIM as an existing one. They weren’t there to be sold; they were there to get activated. So every breakdown below was friction in front of a ready-to-act customer.
With a tight timeline, I leaned on existing research and a close audit rather than net-new studies, journey-mapping each flow and benchmarking competitors to pin down exactly where users slipped.
Journey-mapping the current BYOD flow (prospects)
- Too much on the BYOD page, with no clear sense of where to go or what to click.
- “Check compatibility” sat under step two, but the IMEI checker lived further down the page, out of order with the steps.
- No sense of progress: nothing told users which step they were on or how many were left.
- Too many CTAs competing for the same attention.
- Users had to select their plan twice.
And the Add-A-Line flow (existing customers)
- It never showed the new total monthly bill, only the added cost of the line and phone.
- It didn’t let users change their plan.
- It surfaced the deal the business wanted to promote even when the user wasn’t eligible for it.
- The confirmation pill on the cart page was nearly hidden, so users couldn’t tell a line had been added.
What benchmarking competitors told us
- Only AT&T and T-Mobile explained what an eSIM actually is.
- Mint and Cricket put the IMEI checker right on the BYOD page, and Mint showed users which step they were on, with the option to enter an IMEI or pick by brand and model.
- AT&T had visitors declare up front whether they were new or an existing customer adding a line, branching the flow early.
- Google Fi, like T-Mobile, went deep on device compatibility, while most carriers kept the prospect flow to very few steps.
Different surfaces, one root cause: the flow made users do the system’s work. That pointed straight at the reframe.
From “improve the eSIM experience” to reduce uncertainty at the moments users hesitate.
Improving adoption was never about adding more screens or more instruction. The job was to remove the moments where users stopped feeling confident.
- Reduce friction at the documented drop-off points.
- Translate technical concepts into plain language, in context.
- Give clear, immediate feedback during every critical interaction.
The problem wasn’t that users needed more help. It was that they needed help at the exact moment they were already lost.
Four moves that turned hesitation into completion.
1 · Simplifying the IMEI step
The IMEI input was the largest single drop-off. We rewrote technical terms in plain language, explained where to find an IMEI right next to the field, and rebalanced the button hierarchy so users wouldn’t click out of the flow by accident.
2 · Embedding education in the flow
Instead of separate help pages, guidance lived where the question was asked, inline tips and modals at the exact decision point. Users no longer had to leave the flow to understand it.
3 · Streamlining multi-page flows
The original journey crossed pages owned by different teams. We minimized unnecessary steps, clarified the next action on every page, and added visual cues to keep momentum forward even where team ownership prevented full consolidation.
4 · Designing within constraints
Backend limits and SEO requirements were real. We used inline guidance and modals to simulate a more linear, step-by-step experience without forcing changes to other teams’ pages.
Validated with users, then tightened.
We ran a remote, unmoderated usability study: 15 primary account holders on post-paid plans, a mix of ages (18 to 65) and genders, working through a click-through desktop prototype while thinking aloud, with a follow-up survey.
What testing changed
Tighter copy. We rewrote the specific moments where participants hesitated or misread what a step was asking of them.
Equal footing for eSIM and physical SIM. The business wanted to push eSIM, but physical SIM was still a valid path for many customers. We gave the two options equal visual weight so eSIM led without burying the alternative, keeping the choice honest for anyone who wasn’t eSIM-ready.
A reworked instructions page. New copy and formatting so activation guidance was scannable at the moment users actually needed it.
What I’d carry forward.
The most impactful shift was focusing on reducing uncertainty rather than adding more instruction.
If I continued the work
- Personalization based on device compatibility and user context.
- More proactive guidance during edge cases and failure states.
- Further simplification as backend constraints evolve.
A follow-on refresh moved toward a stepper-based, device-tailored linear flow. My contract ended around the time it was put on hold, details remain under NDA.
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