Barnabas Kendall

Kevin wrote about TextPayMe the other day and yes, we have been sending dollars to each other to try it out. I’ve gotta say: it was perplexing. In my first 10 minutes with it, I communicated with TextPayMe through four transports: SMS, e-mail, website, and an automated phone call (IVR). Mind you, I haven’t even established a method to transfer money in or out of TextPayMe yet. PayPal (also going for M2M) has essentially the same problem, and that is: mistaking mobile browsing for the ugly stepchild of desktop browsing. While netizens in general dislike multi-page navigation, passwords, and waiting for things, these dislikes are elevated to extreme loathing on the mobile web, for obvious reasons. More importantly: an increasing proportion of new internet users won’t have a PC at all.

I have a few suggestions for any would-be M2M company, speaking as a mobile user advocate:

• Don’t force me to use e-mail. Anything I can do with e-mail (such as confirm transfers or anchor my identity) I would probably rather do with SMS.
• Make it possible to use your system from end-to-end on my phone, including register. Sure, I’ll take a desktop browser alternative, but it shouldn’t be the primary means to interact with you.
• As for getting money in and out of your system, there’s one thing all mobile users do every month: pay their mobile bill. Work out a deal with the gatekeepers and give me that option to settle up.

Speaking strictly as a technology provider, I’d like to see a simple but secure API for interacting with your system. If you’re going to do an SMS/IVR confirm step anyway, what’s the harm? We need to work together to enable mobile-only users to send and receive money with as few clicks as possible, but still securely.

Finally, here is a portion of the e-mail I sent to Kevin with feedback on my first 10 minutes of TextPayMe. I think that experience could have been much less frustrating with a little thought to the mobile user experience.

• Tried to visit TextPayMe.com on my phone after I got the initial welcome SMS. It failed because the certificate was not recognized by my phone, and also the page was totally not mobile optimized, which I found strange.
• Created a new account on their site. Note that it must be done via desktop. Signup is interesting because it’s a multiple-stage process that involves getting a pass-phrase SMS’d to your phone, as well as an email validation step. Bad, bad, bad.
• Got the $1 from Kevin and notified via another SMS.
• Got another SMS explaining how to use TextPayMe by just sending SMS messages, like “pay 5 949XXXXXXX”. I tried “bal” to get my balance, which is now $6. That part’s pretty cool.
• I tried logging in to see this too but forgot my password, or maybe I fat-fingered it. The password reset process is bad: You enter your first and last name and phone number, as well as a CAPTCHA which is totally hard to read (I failed the first time). Then I got a call on my phone with an automated message that says “This is TextPayMe. Enter your PIN and the pound key.” Luckily I remembered my PIN. If you forgot both, you’d really be hosed I’m sure. Then it e-mailed me a new scrambled password, which I had to log in to their website with and change, and that option was quite buried.