In 2014, Apple and U2 put an album into the library of every iPhone owner on the planet.
On the one hand, it was a gift, delivered frictionlessly into everyone’s hands. If you didn’t like it, delete it. If you did like it, you didn’t even have to think about it. It just appeared in your ears. To paraphrase Spinal Tap, it’s better than one-click. It’s zero-click.
That’s one better.
On the other hand, U2 broke into your most personal device. The thing that holds your money, your identity, your conversations, your data, your most personal thoughts and preferences. Like the stalker scene in The Bodyguard, they left a present you didn’t want sitting on your bed.
It gave too many people the ick.
#Already enrolled
It jumped back out at me this year when Visa scaled Click to Pay to Revolut’s cardholders. Revolut switched it on at the card level, rather than merchant by merchant, so people arrive at a checkout already enrolled in something they never switched on.
If I was a product person at Visa or Revolut, I can see the discussion going along the lines of, “let’s make it easy, everyone will love it.”
But… will they?
Maybe they do want one-click-to-pay, but they’re already all in with their Apple Pay. They don’t want the mental overhead of another one hanging around their checkout.
And to whose benefit? The customer’s or Visa’s? Is this sludge?
Follow the money and it gets more interesting. For the shop, there isn’t much in it: both are card payments underneath, so the fees are roughly the same either way. The difference is further back. Apple reportedly charges the card issuer around 0.15% of every Apple Pay transaction — enough that it’s now the subject of a £1.5bn claim at the Competition Appeal Tribunal. Click to Pay doesn’t pay Apple anything. The bank and the card scheme keep that slice, and they keep the customer at the checkout, too.
Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. But “easy” is doing a lot of work in that room, and not all of it for the person holding the phone.
#Where do you put it?
If some friction is unavoidable, where do you put it?
It takes a brave product manager to rework a financial product application and bring the know-your-customer checks up near the top of the funnel. The logic is sound: filter out the timewasters early and protect solid conversion rates further down the journey. But it’s a tough internal sell to watch top-of-funnel conversion drop like a stone. And it takes a lot of nerve to let it play out for long enough to learn if it really works.
From the customer’s side, though, plenty of people invest 15–20 minutes in an application… and then fail at the KYC stage. We’re relying on the sunk cost fallacy to make them push through.
Arguably, that’s not there to protect good customer outcomes. It’s there to protect revenue for the financial institution.
#Just tick that wee box
My first job was in a guitar shop when I was 16. So many of the lessons I learned there translate to product decisions on large-scale financial products. Dealing with people (not customers) face to face, and making plenty of mistakes along the way, has given me a brilliant reference point.
Back then, we could offer budding musicians and DJs interest-free credit to help them buy the next piece of kit that was going to catapult them from the bedroom to backstage at the O2. We’d get regular visits from the finance company to train us on the latest offers and how to process the paper application forms. What ID was acceptable, what wasn’t. And, crucially, how much commission we’d each get per application — multiplied several times over if we got them to tick a wee box for something called “payment protection insurance”.
It’s fair to say that a lot of those applications were a case of the blind leading the blind. I’d watch cynical sales guys, focussed on their commission, do their worst.
“What do I put here?” a 20-year-old with her hands almost on her dream guitar would ask.
“Just tick that wee box,” would come the response from a spotty 19-year-old sales assistant.
But when challenged — “yeah, but what does it mean? Feels like a rip-off to me” — it could only be met with burning red cheeks and an embarrassed “erm, I’m not sure. We just get told to make you tick it.”
That’s the old-world, pen-and-paper version of badly chosen defaults and dark patterns. And it’s a reminder that it’s much harder to stare down someone who’s being ripped off when you’re in the same room.
#Would I do this face to face?
So that’s my test. Asking myself the simple question, “would I do this face to face?”, has proven to be a great one. It’s the same sniff test I used on data collection a few years ago, and it works just as well on convenience.
I replay app journeys and online forms as if I’m filling them in alongside that person, with pen and paper, imagining the questions they’d ask. It gives me a gut-feeling check before we even have to get user testing involved to prove or disprove anything.
And if the honest answer to “what does it mean?” is burning red cheeks, you don’t need the user testing.