Jan 31

Written By Ben Gifford

Exploring a strategic shift from payment processor and toward experience enabler.

Role: UX Design, UI Design, Research Timeline: 3 months Team: UX Director, UX Designer, UI Designer, UX Researcher, Project Manager Tools: Sketch

Payments is a race to the bottom: high-volume, low-margin, and the winner still loses.

Amazon wanted to understand opportunities to expand beyond competent payment processor to something categorically different. They engaged a team at Blink UX, including myself in the UX lead role, to explore this and show them likely futures.

To get beyond just making a better checkout experience, I had to understand the current landscape, so I conducted multitudes of stakeholder interviews, researched how people interact with payment systems in the physical world, pored over usage data, ran benchmarked for booking, shopping, and payment experiences.

I learned that people were frustrated with inconsistency across the industry, and by unavailable help when needed, and of extreme skepticism of frictionless payment: friction is a feature, not a bug, for purchasers.

I learned nobody thinks—or cares—too much about how they pay, because payment is just a way of getting to the thing they want.

Based on the deep research, workshops, and explorations, I created a range of payment stories that articulated a wide breadth of scenarios: high-end to low, real-time to asynchronous, high CXM integrated to one-off.

I developed a framework to account for input modalities and authentication states, and prescribe experience requirements, to validate the huge range of possible experiences, and to make the design model fully extensible: any new payment “surface” should be plug and play.

We are just now beginning to see the fruit of this work, with seamless payment experiences from Amazon emerging throughout their properties over the past 18 months. Low-touch, seamless, high-security payment.