Rethinking How People Pay for Goods and Services for Amazon Pay
How Ben helped Amazon think 15 years into the future and design a payment platform that facilitates experiences seamlessly
CHALLENGE
Payments as an experience enabler, not just a button on a page
Role
UX Lead
Industry
Payment Infrastructure
Timeline
3 Months
Activities
Benchmarking, UX Research, Envisioning, Product Design
Team
Blink UX
Payments is a race to the bottom. Amazon wanted to understand what areas of opportunity existed to redefine the business from payment processor to something categorically different. They engaged a team at Blink UX, including myself in the UX lead role to explore this and show them where they should be positioning themselves.
Amazon wanted to understand the direction it should take its product to differentiate it and shift it into an entirely different category of experience enabler.
APPROACH
Learning what people pay for, how, and seeing where there are cracks in the system
Design workshops and a multitude of stakeholder interviews allowed us to understand the business. We went out into the wild and observed how people shopped, how they paid. We pored over usage data and benchmarked leading booking, shopping, and payment experiences
We learned that people were frustrated by inconsistencies, with clumsy point-of-sale interaction, but were afraid of too-seamless experiences. We learned nobody thinks too much about how they pay, because payment is just a way of getting to the thing they want. How can we shift from “how you pay” to “enabling of experiences”?
SOLUTION
A map of the way to the future of payments: enabling experiences
Based on the deep research, workshops, and explorations, a world of payment experiences was created that articulated the core principles and variables of what a future payment experience should be like—think of it as a payment system. Intelligent, personal, contextualized, seamless, easy, and secure.
IMPACT
Successful differentiation and enabling of experiences
We are just now beginning to see the fruit of this work, with seamless payment experiences from Amazon emerging throughout their properties over the past 18 months. Low-touch, seamless, high-security payment.
