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An Australian bank had a vision to create a new payment solution for their merchant customers. It became known from the beginning of the project that in order to provide a seamless payment solution, it was critical to own the entire experience, from terminal management to point of sale. My role as one of the key UX designers on the project, was to ensure that the product would fit the needs of our users, whether they were consumers, merchants or internal banking staff.
“A person with a disability has a right to obtain goods and use services and facilities in the same way as people without a disability.” - The Australian Human Rights commission.
There was a strong emphasis on accessibility in the project, especially given another major bank and key competitor was sued for more than 1 million dollars for inaccessible pin entry. This lawsuit resulted in additional due diligence and care within product teams in the banking sector to ensure all products and services were truly serving the needs of their diverse user groups.
Our project team was no exception. We embedded several measures as a team to ensure WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance was consistent across the native iOS app, Android Payment terminal and staff portal products. In addition, we designed several rounds of usability testing with people with disabilities, to ensure the products were easy to use and met their needs.
From a consumer perspective, a wide range of people interact with physical payment terminals, making it essential for usability testing to reflect this diversity. Anyone making a purchase in a retail store, hospitality venue, or service business could be our end user. To ensure the project's success, it was crucial to validate both the physical hardware and the software interface with participants from various backgrounds, especially with disabilities.
Since our goal was to assess ease of use and task completion on this new payment terminal, we wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how different users—particularly those with varying accessibility needs—might interact with the device and what expectations or challenges they might encounter. Including participants with disabilities allowed us to uncover insights specific to accessibility, improving the design for all users.
The key objectives of the test was to assess whether people could independently perform the main functions of a physical payment terminal;
In order to effectively test these key tasks, we developed a beta app and launched this product on a sample of the new hardware payment device. We used a mix of quantitative and qualitative usability testing metrics such as task completion rate and post task reflection to measure user satisfaction of the device.
The team and I set up a test lab environment; an accessible private space to host the usability sessions. The space included audio simulations of a busy cafe to mimic the loud and distracting environments that a user would often be in when attempting to pay for a bill. We developed a range of user testing scenarios that would lead the user to participate in each of these key tasks, using a test bank card and a bill of over $100.
There were a range of key insights we discovered from the research, including feedback on the user interface of the terminal itself and tweaks to the voice over script to improve the usability. In addition to the key recommendations to the software, we also discovered several key usability issues related to the device’s hardware, such as the symbol on the clear button not being very distinguishable just through touch, and the proximity of the OK and Clear button being too close which runs the risk of user error. We listed the insights and our recommendations and communicated this to the hardware manufacturer of the payment terminal. The key insights from this research and the recommendations were documented in a research report and presented to key stakeholders in the Bank.
Beyond product insights, this project highlighted ways to make our research operations more inclusive. Key takeaways included:
These learnings were documented, shared within the design and research teams, and integrated into our organisation’s research practices.
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