Adding a Phone Number on X: a bad User Experience

Today, I want to share an example of poor user experience from X, which cost Elon Musk $40 billion. Despite having a team that works on improving it daily, they missed something important I’ll share here.

Getting verified on X

On X, you know that some accounts have a blue checkmark. These are verified accounts that pay for extra features. While it's not necessary to have the blue checkmark, it adds an extra layer of trust to your account.

Lately, I definitely need to check out DigikoCrypto, an account for a decentralized service launching on October 1st. There are investors, project believers, and followers who track updates daily. They'll decide on October 1st whether to invest in this project, which has a market cap of around $500,000, based on what they see and feel.

It's really important for my team that DigikoCrypto at least gets the blue checkmark. There's also the gold one, but that's a different story.

Adding a phone number to get verified

To be verified, you need to add a phone number to your account. This process is simple and quick, in theory. I go to account settings:

In Your Account, I go to Account Information:

Asking the password again (😂)

Asking to add your number:

Asking to validate it

Sending a message to a +44 number (around 0.25€ 😂)

Waiting the damn time (2-3 minutes, not 15 sec)

Getting this screen for the 1000 time

Let's ask some help to the Help Center

I can't add my phone number to my account, and the worst part is, there's no info on what the error might be. Is it a service issue or a message not going through? I have no clue. Naturally, I thought customer support would help, but when I checked X's Help Center, I was shocked to find there's no way to contact someone who can actually solve my problem.

The Help Center is set up to give you info to troubleshoot on your own, and only sometimes can you fill out a form to get in touch with support. My issue doesn't fit into any of those categories. There's help for things like privacy, copyright, and account hacks, but nothing for phone number issues.

I've already tried reaching out to support using related topics, but my case was just closed. Plus, the info on adding a phone number is outdated. It talks about the old method of verifying a number with a message, not the current method of sending it to a +44 number, along with all the issues that come with that.

A Terrible User Experience

The first problem is that you don't provide an alternative way to verify the phone number, after deliberately reversing the process just for cost-saving reasons. Before, I would receive the confirmation message and it always arrived, as it does with all other services. Now, I have to send the message, pay for this operation, and if it fails, pay again and again until I realize it will never work. If you had provided an alternative method in case of a failed attempt, perhaps you could have solved the issue.

Then comes the Help Center, where I seek assistance, and I find myself in a maze overwhelmed with informations, and the only stuff I need isn't even there because it hasn't been updated. I expect, as a user, to be able to contact someone because you haven't provided the tools for me to manage on my own, but you've decided to remove this option for simple cost reasons.

I've tried everything, even consulting X and Reddit where there are thousands of other users with the same problem, and after 7 days, I'm still unable to do it despite trying everything. I've spent 17 euros on SMS so far trying to verify my phone number, and I still haven't got it done.

How I solved the problem

Yes, at one point, I solved the problem, and believe me, it was after way too much time (and money spent on SMS).

How did I do it? I don’t know. Or rather, I can only tell you that I tried 5 different phone numbers and only the fifth one worked immediately, while the others kept failing the verification process.

Why? Honestly, I don’t know. You have to consider that maybe your provider doesn’t send SMS to international numbers because you have no remaining credit or due to some configuration issue. And even if they do send them, it doesn’t mean they’ll be received for some unknown reason.

So, the solution is to try different numbers until one is finally accepted by X based on no logical criteria.

Good luck, and trust me, I get you!