T-Mobile is definitely not trying to charge you $10 more | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile is definitely not trying to charge you $10 more

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32 pointsdevarty15 comments

Yearssss back when I was still on Tinder they did the same thing in the app with the "Delete my profile" button.

There was first a "log me out" option then a lot of whitespace followed by the "Delete my profile" option which was not in the viewport by default.

I wonder how many people who set out to delete their profile didn't actually do so. It's definitely a dark-pattern.

This post is mad at the wrong company.

The root cause is the design choice for the operating system to hide the scroll bar.

This. The fact that there's no UI affordance for "hey, there's more down there!" is the real problem here.

I think it's 50 | 50. Most likely, T Mobile designers knew this and chose to design it this way. If they didn't notice it immediately, it would've come to light during user testing or even QA testing.

There certainly appears to be enough unused white space beneath the plan selection portion and the congestion overages warning that could have otherwise shown the cheaper plan.

Yes, having a scrollbar would let people realize there is another option, but why is the viewport so small to begin with?

You’re supposed to design the list so there’s half an item at the bottom, suggesting there’s more to find.

It was a huge pain to find that plan on the desktop web site. I hadn't looked in a while but I thought that T-Mo had offloaded all of its prepaid plans to an MVNO. I didn't know this plan existed. I might try to get it now, at least for 1 month, though T-mo coverage is crap in my area.

If you're willing to deal with an annual plan through an MVNO and buy through ebay(!), this is the cheapest I know of, starting at $30/year ($2.50/month) with 200MB: https://www.redpocket.com/plans/ebay

200MB is more mobile data than I use most months since I mostly use a laptop and/or wifi (I use mobile data for occasionally checking email or directions or browsing low-bandwidth sites like HN when bored). YMMV. They have larger plans too. I have their now-defunct $10/month plan on AT&T. Redpocket is not the greatest but it's legitimate as far as I can tell.

Hanlon's razor > never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

It's not even incompetence. Just a bug.

In the context of Hanlon's razor "incompetence" usually just means a mistake.

T-Mobile has done a good job to keep its customer-base happy. A UI problem like this most likely seems like a mistake. If something like this happened at Comcast, everyone would be screaming.

Having "undesirable" CTAs below viewport is definitely a tried and true dark pattern.

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for them to simply not offer that plan?

They were forced to start offering that plan in order for the government to approve their merger with Sprint: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/t-mobile-says-sprint-merger-m...

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