Quickairtime is an online service designed to enable you top-up your mobile phone as quickly as possible on the go.
At its core, Quick Airtime is a top-up marketplace. When users make a purchase from quickairtime.com, they are actually buying from a micro merchant on the street corner. This concept of a marketplace top-up platform serves as a major differentiator for Quickairtime. The advantage to having many street merchants vying for sales on one platform is that the competition ensures that users will always get discounts on every airtime purchase – as much as 10% for Nigeria operators, and up to 20% for USA Operators etc. Discounts are subject to daily exchange rates, chosen payment option, merchants and even user IP address (I managed to get a 0.5% discount on N500 airtime purchase).
Quickairtime.com is currently only accessible via your desktop or mobile browser.
Love the simplified UI…
I like how Quickairtime employs a very simplified UI to focus on getting the job done – helping users top-up their mobile phones quickly. There’s no fancy tile-based UI overlayed that just ends up confusing intending users. Just a couple of input fields and a payment button and, if you are using Quickairtime on the web, radio and plus-minus buttons with which you can setup multiple top-ups for as many as one million (they claim) phone numbers simultaneously.
Not so much the UX ….
However, I feel like they went a little too far with the simplification. What Quickairtime has done is to do away user accounts. Rather than having to login with a username and password, all you are required to enter is your email address (which you must have verified on initial use), mobile network, amount of recharge and the mobile number you wish to recharge. Then you can select your payment option and authorise payment. Quickairtime offers a variety of checkout options including PayPal, Google Wallet, Mastercard, Verified by Visa, eTranzact and of course, Interswitch.
This approach seems straightforward enough but I feel like it hurts the user experience, especially on mobile. Below is a screenshot of Quickairtime on mobile.
You have to scroll and fill in those same details every time you want to top-up. And you still have to contend with authorizing payments. Imagine you had to do that with Interswitch. That means more forms and the dreaded OTP. The process of topping up your phone should not be that agonizing.
I imagine things would be less painful if there was an option to save my primary phone number and regular top-up amount, not necessarily by way of user accounts. Then I would be at least one or 2 clicks away from instant top-up.
Thankfully, the guys behind Quickartime are not unaware of the UX issues. An important step they have taken towards improving the user experience, particularly on mobile, is to disable multiple top-ups on the mobile site. But they are not stopping there.
Mobile apps are in the works
Quickairtime Head of Research & Development, Uduak Asuquo tells me that mobile apps for Android, iOS, Asha, Windows Phone, Symbian and Blackberry are already in the works and should all go live by the middle of September, precisely the 13th. Symbian users can already download the app from the Ovi Store.
As I have been made to understand, the Quickairtime mobile app will come with tons of features which more than address some of my UX concerns:
Auto Topup – Automatically loads your phone from your ATM card when your airtime is out. The mobile app knows when you are out of airtime.
Recurring Topup – Topup your phone, daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly.
Multiple Payment Options – Payment processing available through Interswitch, eTranzact, unified payments, Paypal, Google Checkout, Amazon payments, and Authorize.net
Developer API – Open API available for merchant accounts at zero cost.
Accessibility – The app will be available in 120+ countries in 26 languages including Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba.
And lots more. As Uduak puts it, the mobile app is “engineered to be the best mobile app in the world based on simplicity, accessibility and usefulness”.
We can’t wait for the mobile app.
