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 ...