User challenges and successes with mobile payment services in North America

Abstract

Mobile payment services have recently emerged in North America where users pay for items using their smartphones. Yet we have little understanding of how people are making use of them and what successes and challenges they have experienced. As a result, we conducted a diary and interview study of user behaviors, motivations, and first impressions of mobile payment services in North America in order to understand how to best design for mobile payment experiences. Participants used a variety of services, including Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, LevelUp, Square and company apps geared towards payments (e.g., Starbucks). Our findings show that users experience challenges related to mental model development, pre-purchase anxiety and trust issues, despite enjoying the gamification, ease-of-use, and support for routine purchases with mobile payments. This suggests designing a better mobile payment experience through the incorporation of users' routines and behaviors, gamification and trust mechanism development.

'I Can't Even Buy Apples If I Don't Use Mobile Pay?'

“…[32,57]). Examples here include a study of the introduction of M-Pesa in Kenya [31], mobile payments [25] and the push toward a cashless society in India [34], the use and social interaction around Bristol Pound in the UK [36], the combination of social and mobile payment through Venmo in the US [2,10], as well as successes and challenges users in North America have experienced with mobile payments [18]. Across these studies, researchers find that mobile payment adoption and usage are social, culturally situated phenomena, where local values and cultural practices have a strong influence on whether and how such systems get used and integrated into daily practice.…”

Follow the Money

“…Likewise, there is a growing body of knowledge on how both digital payment systems (e.g. [9,14,16,18]) and digital financial services (e.g. [6,19]), including loans [22], provide distinctive physical and social affordances that can shape patterns of interaction around their users' financial management.…”

“…Participants were asked to keep a ten-day diary of their day-to-day transactions, longer than most similar studies [3,14]. The diary entries were to include money spent, received, transferred, saved, lent, borrowed, and gifted.…”

Moneywork

“…However, perhaps led by the apparent successes of disruption by the emerging "fintech" (Chuen et al 2015) industry, and in particular, the attention around BitCoin and MPesa, there is a small but growing body of literature that acknowledges the importance of the interactional phenomena that surround the delivery of financial services through mobile platforms (Donovan 2014). Research has begun to report on the application of digital technologies such as NFC in payments (Ailisto et al 2009), QR codes (Maurer et al 2013), the development of digital wallets (Olsen et al 2012), and an exploration of the challenges and successes with mobile payment services (Hillman et al 2014;Maurer 2015). Various challenges are seen to face the design and adoption of mobile payment systems ranging from cultural practices of potential users (Arnado 2012), to concerns over privacy (Maurer et al 2012), to the fast pace of innovation and competition within the mobile payments industry itself (Ondrus and Lyytinen 2011).…”