Capture the Bare Minimum When Requesting Payment Card Details
The end goal for a lot of sites and apps is getting a customer to pay for a product or service. It’s a cause for celebration: we’ve made something or are offering something so good that the user is happy to spend their hard-earned currency with us. So, why do we make it so hard for them to do so?
Over the years we’ve all pieced together a robust mental model of what it means to pay for something online. Any attempt to change this model to something different or more complex is going to create user friction and confusion. A credit or debit card number is already an unwieldy amount of data for a user to enter, so make it as easy as possible for them:
- Only collect what you need: the card number, expiry date, and CV2 code should be sufficient for almost all online purchases.
- Depending on your payment provider you may also have to collect postal (or ZIP) codes.
- Allow the user to...
