payment

Confusing card payment screens

March 17, 2010 in All posts

This is a personal bugbear of mine: badly-designed payment screens. The payment stage is absolutely critical: if a site screws up here, a customer will quite often leave the journey if they:

• Get confused by what’s being asked of them
• The content of the site isn’t accurate/correct
• If the site doesn’t inspire confidence in the purchase process

With that in mind, DomainMonster should revise their card payment section:

It all starts off well: select the card type, and fill in the details…only it gets confusing because I’ve selected Visa Debit, yet each of the questions still have a * next to them, indicating they’re mandatory…except the ones with (Maestro only) are purporting to only need completing if the user has a Maestro card.

So which is it? Do I fill them in anyway? What if my card doens’t have those details on it? What if it does, but I’m being told I don’t need to complete the fields? What’ll happen if I don’t fill them in?

The problem is that these are such trivial issues, but often they’re enough to make users bail out of a journey.

The solution? Dynamically alter the question set depending on the type of card they choose from the drop-down. It’s not hard to do, and could drastically improve the usability of this section.