For small merchants, purchasing or renting a payment terminal is a necessary evil - additional cost for their business. Some of them don’t need advanced hardware, they just need to take a payment from time to time.

Payment terminals are usually bulky. Even those with compact size are still an additional device that needs to be carried, charged and operated. How to get rid of this device to make life of delivery person or taxi driver easier?

Fiserv decided to load payment application into the regular Android smartphone so user will not need to carry additional device. Application that turns user's smartphone into a mobile POS system.

There are 2 personas that use this application: a merchant and a client (cardholder).

Solution was tested for about a year with friendly merchants in their work places as a part of the "pilot" release (see photo from the barber shop below). My team conducted also usability testing with cardholders - we were selling lemonade near Vistula river in the center of Warsaw, Poland (cardholders were asked to pay with the test card, see photo below).

I presented the issues spotted during testing to the product management and development teams. Example findings:
- Entering PIN on glass leaves marks on the screen (security concern),
- Weak NFC might not detect a card- users had to move card around the phone,
- User might use battery saving mode which would disconnect app from the internet,
- Entering amounts is different on smartphone then on the terminal

During 2-days workshop teams were discussing possible solutions and prioritising the work. I learned how important is discussion and alignment - not everything can be implemented. Some ideas are hard to develop, some are against regulations. Sometimes there is not enough expected benefit from investing in solving usability problems. Fortunately most important flaws have been addressed.

Application successfully entered a market and brings revenue to the company. It is used by debt collector and courier companies (5 of which are big players on the Polish market). Application is available in Google Play store for selected countries.

Simplified transaction flow: enter amount, present card, send receipt to customer.

Video prototype for one of initial versions created by my team.