For just over a week I was one of the 9% of the UK population who doesn’t have a smartphone. In fact it was worse than that I didn’t even have a landline.
We’ve all done it – my Google Pixel was in the back pocket of my jeans and ended up in the loo. I had thought the model was water resistant but turns out it wasn’t. It took about a week to die then it’s replacement turned up damaged and had to go back. Eventually I dug out an old Huawei but in that nine days, even with a Chromebook and a work laptop I felt digitally excluded.
Given my job I know that organisations prefer that we transact with them online, and even better via an app on a phone but due to my circumstances I was denied access to so many things that I had previously taken for granted. Things that, now I was logged in from the Chromebook needed verification that I was who I claimed to be. And how did they want me to verify? You guessed it – a verification code sent to my phone. #epicfail
Like the majority of people I couldn’t remember my account passwords because I use fingerprint recognition on the apps on my phone. So I couldn’t access Amazon – my husband had to do it for me. I almost couldn’t pay him back via online banking but eventually I found my card reader at the back of the kitchen drawer.
I couldn’t do an online shop with Sainsbury’s because they wanted to send a pin to my phone and when I phoned customer services they said there was nothing they could do – Tesco got my custom instead.
I couldn’t use PayPal for the duration either so paying for a lot of things was tricky and I had to dig out my bank cards which have been languishing in a bag in the bottom of the wardrobe since the start of the first lockdown.
These are all parts of the customer journey that these organisations’ service designers have either not bothered with or have been told to ignore if they are using the 80/20 rule. If they had half-decent call centres or webchat maybe I wouldn’t have been so stuck but for me this didn’t seem an option with the services I was trying to access.
I’m back in business now but my brief period of being digitally excluded was frustrating and exhausting – everything went round in circles with no result.
So I think my take from this is that there are varying degrees of digital exclusion, from no technology, to some technology to fully digital and it’s the bit in the middle that organisations are ignoring.
It also goes to show that we can escape from the tech hamster wheel most of us are trapped in and think about where we can reuse or lengthen the life of our digital devices.
But don’t get me started on digital waste. That’s a whole other post.
Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash
I'm no expert 