Chapter 4. Building Trust into Mobile Payments
One of the key tenets of human/computer interaction is to avoid inciting anxiety in the user, which can be caused by uncertainty about negative events.[50] This is especially true when dealing with people’s hard-earned money. Eliminating that uncertainty with design is a matter of addressing or finding out what your users expect from an experience, and catering to those expectations as much as possible, using common user interfaces that the user will recognize. With nascent technology like mobile payments, there are less abundant examples of successful design patterns than, say, for ecommerce shopping carts or browsing a social network feed. Still, there are some emerging patterns and best practices that we can look to as good (or bad) examples.
Don’t Design for Early Adopters, Design for Everyone Else
Mobile payments are not really a new thing. Consumers in places like Japan and South Korea have enjoyed immensely popular mobile payment initiatives since 2004, beginning with services like FeliCa and NTT DoCoMo’s osaifu keitai (“wallet phone”), with transaction volume surpassing ¥1 trillion by 2007.[51] They have also been using the same phones as door keys and airline boarding passes. So now that all these technologies exist in the mobile space, how come we aren’t using them every day here in North America?
The easy answers to the adoption question are generally centered on the fact that swiping a plastic card still works (mostly) and ...