Designing Mobile Payment Experiences

Preface

What Is This Book About?

As mobile devices emerge as tools for transacting and self-identifying, designers face challenging new interactions and user expectations, especially from payment scenarios. Consumers expect mobile payment experiences to be frictionless and familiar while faithfully protecting their financial data. Falling short on either of these aspects will cause users to drop out, or worse, will compromise their financial privacy. This book will show designers and developers how to meet these challenges through user experience (UX) best practices, as well as provide a primer on the world of mobile commerce.

What Are Mobile Payments?

When defining generally what a mobile payment is, I find it helpful to start by looking at who is paying whom, rather than delineating these experiences according to the facilitating technology (we’ll get into that later). There are four basic categories, as outlined in Table 1.

Of these four, this book focuses on consumer payments, though we will touch on the other three scenarios when appropriate. We’ll talk about both in-person (standing inside a brick-and-mortar store) or remote (placing an order to pick up later) experiences. One reason for focusing on the consumer experience is sheer numbers: there are more mobile users who are consumers than those who are merchants. The other reason is that of these four scenarios, the act of making a purchase is the most nuanced and prone to ambiguity, and therefore the most challenging.

Table 1. Basic categories of mobile payments

Type	Description	Examples
Consumer payments	Paying a merchant for goods or services	Starbucks, Isis Wallet
Merchant payments	Receiving money in exchange for goods or services from a consumer	Square Register, PayPal Here
Person-to-person payments	Sending money to another person, as a gift or a payback	Venmo, Dwolla
Institutional payments	Paying an institution for a monthly utility bill or debt	Check, Mobilligy

I may tackle the other three payment categories in future editions of this book. Merchant payments in particular would warrant a whole series (have you ever seen or used a point-of-sale terminal, pre-Square and the like? Yikes). At any rate, the tenets and recommendations I’ve included in this book, particularly those around ease of use and fostering user trust, could readily be applied to any sort of mobile commerce interaction.

Who Should Read This Book?

The audience for this book is designers, developers, and product managers interested in building a mobile commerce experience. I hope this book serves as a primer for experience makers from a variety of environments—from maverick startups looking to change the way we use our phones to those entrenched in the world of banking who are looking to integrate a new payment capability into their existing mobile services. This book started off as a simple list of mobile design principles, tailored for transactional experiences, which I kept for my own reference. I hope you will find it inspirational and instructive.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into the following seven chapters:

Chapter 1

A look back at the history of money and how humans pay for things, why this shapes user expectations and intentions, and how the intimate exchange between consumer and merchant has evolved.

Chapter 2

An overview of the components of the mobile payments ecosystem, and how these players work (or don’t work) together to support mobile payment technologies.

Chapter 3

A close examination of the current market of payment apps (Google Wallet, Isis, Square, PayPal, LevelUp, and others), highlighting the innovations and shortcomings of their designs.

Chapter 4

The first encounter with a payments app is fraught with peril: awkward credit card form fields, endless legal disclaimers, and tricky authentication flows. This chapter will demonstrate how to painlessly onboard new users, while maintaining bank-grade security and risk prevention.

Chapter 5

A walkthrough of the crux of this new paradigm...using a phone at the point of sale to authorize a transaction. This chapter covers many of the outcomes that could happen in the midst of a payment: How does the user know when the payment is complete? What if the transaction fails? What if the user needs to enter a PIN code?

Chapter 6

There are several value propositions that designers could miss, which could progress a mobile payment experience from a novelty to an essential. A mobile wallet can do things your old leather wallet can’t do: send you discounts and deals for your favorite retailers, help you track your spending and stick to a budget, complete peer-to-peer money transfers, and get an updated balance on your accounts.

Chapter 7

A look ahead at how these consumer experiences will shape the retail and m-ecommerce world, and the emerging technologies that will propel them.

Author’s Note

The content of this book reflects the personal insight and opinions of the Author, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or policies of his employer, Monitise plc., or its customers. This book was created by the Author in his individual capacity, is the Author’s personal work, and is not edited by nor can it be attributed to the Author’s employer.

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the boundless love and support of my beautiful wife, Sabrina, who put up with my late nights and general absentmindedness about anything not mobile commerce–related (parenting, household chores, personal hygiene, basic conversation skills) for the better part of a year while I wrote this book. To my giggly and bright baby boy, Miles, I am thankful that at six months you figured out how to sleep for 10 hours at a time, giving me a reliable daily window to write this book. I am looking forward to sketching and building new things with you, and helping you see our world filtered through your own creativity.

I’m thankful to my Mom for teaching me to approach any problem from all angles, not just how a textbook prescribes it (an uncommon view, coming from an algebra teacher). She also instilled in me the core values of Southern Hospitality, which influenced my own personal stamp on user experience design: courtesy, grace, and inclusion. I am grateful also to my Dad for teaching me that the best way to figure something out is to get your hands dirty, and to always pay attention to the details.

I am indebted to the impeccable staff at O’Reilly for helping me bring this book to life. In particular, I’d like to thank Mary Treseler, for putting the whole crazy idea in my head in the first place and then shaping that idea into a viable narrative. Amy Jollymore had the arduous task of slogging through each chapter to make some sense of the ramblings of a first-time writer. I thank you both for your guidance throughout this process. My first window into the world of user experience design was framed by great O’Reilly titles like Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Designing Web Interfaces, so it is humbling for me to contribute to the wealth of knowledge available from this community.

I’ve been blessed with the tutelage of a few visionary mentors who have had a huge impact on my understanding of design for mobile financial services. My first design manager, Evan Gerber, instilled in me a holistic view of UX and how it fits into a person’s daily life, as well as the ability to be creative under seemingly insurmountable design constraints. Evan is also responsible for stealing me away from the world of library and information science, and helped me to connect the dots from what I learned from that discipline to the broader needs of all technology users. I am also endlessly appreciative of my managers at Monitise, Stuart Cook and Chris Craver, for imparting decades of wisdom from their expertise in the world of financial technology, as well as for looking through early drafts to check my facts and offer feedback on the evolution of payments technology.

Lastly, I am thankful for the illuminating feedback from my early reviewers—Evan Gerber, Matthew Russell, and Tommy Wolber—for sharing their insight and sense-checking the material from the perspective of a wider tech and design audience. It’s humbling to have input from some of the brightest minds in the industry.

But Wait...There’s More

The world of technology is always in flux, and this is especially true in financial tech. I encourage you to visit my blog on mobile payments design to see my take on these emerging experiences through the eye of UX, and to share your views on this fascinating topic: http://mobilepaymentux.com.