Designing Mobile Payment Experiences

Chapter 5. Designing Successful Payment Interactions

Your user is standing at the register in a grocery store. The cashier rings up her purchases, and a total amount displays on a screen. Your user has pulled out her phone with the intent to pay using your app. What happens next? This is, of course, the crux of mobile payment design, and if the experience is unclear or broken, or simply takes too long, you can bet the user will not give your app a second chance.

Regardless of the method you utilize, the most important factors to keep in mind when plotting out your payment flow are time and effort. In the context of a shopping experience, the window during which a payment at the register happens is relatively tiny, compared with all the effort users expend in the process of purchasing something. A task analysis of a typical shopping trip reveals five phases: planning, travel, browsing, purchase, and completion (Figure 5-1). Each phase has its own set of tasks that users must complete to reach their end goal—buying groceries, for example.

When designing your checkout experience, consider the cost of user effort with the timing of these tasks, in context with all the other steps users have to take to get to this point, and think about how those previous tasks might influence their mindset. Are they annoyed because they waited in a long line? Did they find everything they wrote down on their shopping list? How many bus transfers did they make in order to get to the grocery store? In terms ...