Pondering the usability of a credit card.

I find myself wondering at their simplistic design while carrying such an important and complex function. A small, thin, rectangular piece of plastic with a few punched out words and sequences of numbers, a magnetic strip and, increasingly, a small almost square chip embedded within their upper surface layer. It seems like such an incredible feat of design that they provide such functionality and carry such a large amount of information while remaining such an unobtrusive object so easily carried by so many people.Yet it would seem I’m not quite so easily won over. I look at these plastic wonders and think “what a poor design this is… how have they managed to continue to be used for so long without making any attempt to improve their usability?” so it seems only reasonable that I lay out my primary concern for your consideration and, with a little bit of luck, to get you thinking just that little bit more about how the design of an everyday object affects how you use it.

There are a number of problems with the design of a credit card I can come up with before I have to stop and think about it, so here goes:

• Those punched out, usually silver coloured, numbers are incredibly difficult to read. I regularly have to angle the card, hold my head at a funny angle and pray to the gods of light that I may be allowed to read the numbers accurately so my website based purchase goes through without issue.
• The magnetic stripe on the reverse is fairly effective at storing and retrieving the small amounts of data required of it, but they wear out. If you have ever experienced the frustration of watching a cashier swiping, swiping and re-swiping your card before it finally gets accepted, you’ll know why I’m mentioning this.
• That little three (or four in the case of American Express) digit code on the reverse of the card on the signature strip. Does anyone actually know what this is called? I’ve seen at least a dozen different ways to refer to it in use on websites and this does not exactly aid usability if you need to work out what is being referred to each time.
• The signature strip … uhm … my handwriting is bad enough to start with and if I get anything close to my real signature on these things, it’s almost worthy of a celebration. Then a few months later you note your signature is beginning to fade, just a little, just enough to make it more difficult for a cashier to compare to the slip you’ve just signed.

Those are all valid points which simply should not exist these days. The core number could use a better colour and be coated with a more durable material to ensure it is far easier to read under different lighting circumstances and with age. The magnetic stripe is a little more tricky, but more durable coatings exist which wouldn’t interfere with the data reading, it’s just down to the willingness of the developers to experiment and find out what works best over a few years. The credit card verification number on the signature strip should be so simple to solve, all it would take is for all the providers to use the same terminology consistently and to repeatedly request their merchants alter their wording to match. The signature strip falls under the same scenario as the magnetic strip, so no point repeating that one.

So that’s it covered, right? Four simple little points which if tackled could enhance the usability of your credit card. None of them big issues in their own right, but put together it should simply become less of an irritation over time. Well, not quite.

Perhaps the biggest single annoyance I have with credit cards, particularly since the move to chip and pin where the card owner typically inserts their card into a reader rather than having the more experienced cashier do it, is the shape. When placing into a chip and pin machine it must be inserted the correct way for the chip to be read. Yet there are four ways you can insert it.

• With the chip toward the reader and facing up.
• With the chip toward the reader and facing down.
• With the chip away from the reader and facing up.
• With the chip away from the reader and facing down.

Isn’t that annoying? Only one of those will work (typically chip toward the machine and up, but not always!) yet the machine will not prevent you inserting it using any of the other three options. Now consider your digital camera, or film camera if you have resisted replacing it. The media (compact flash, secure digital, memory stick, 135 film cannister etc) can only physically be inserted one way and will only work if inserted one way. This means that short of picking up a small lump hammer and battering it, if you have been able to insert your media, it is correct and should work as expected. Why is this not the case with the credit card, an item inserted and removed far more than the media in a camera? I do not believe it would be especially difficult to come up with a design to ensure this one-fit option, although as it was not implemented before chip and pin came into play it would be costly to make the switch now. Then again, perhaps the new design could be made to work in current equipment so that there is a gradual transition as new devices replace old. This needs industry commitment… oh dear.

I am now finding myself interested to know how regularly customers inserting their card the wrong way round is still an issue, so there may be a follow up article in a few weeks if I get around to doing some research (err, by which I mean talking to some cashiers).