Why filling in credit cards forms online is painful

Posted by Tim on the 23 June in User Experience

Why some companies choose to make filling these forms harder than they need to be is beyond us at Design Militia. A simple web form for filling in your payment details normally consists of:

Card number
Expiry date
CVV/CVC code (security code on the back of most cards).

Let's take the expiry date as an example. The website shall remain nameless. On all credit and debit cards, expiry date is displayed in numerical format as mm/yy (10/12). Yet, when I came to fill in this field – why am I met with the month spelled out (Jan, Feb, March etc.), instead of the number.

Okay, this might not seem like a big deal to you… I mean you know the months, right? But think about it. This way forces us to convert the numbers on the cards to the corresponding month in our heads instead of just entering in the number without thinking (as Steve Krug famously wrote Don't Make Me Think!). Yes this is only the slightest of pauses, but it's a completely unnecessary pause that could have been avoided with a bit of common sense. How many other “slight pauses” is your day filled with that just don’t need to be there? And that my friends, is the essence of user-experience. This is why at Design Militia we always test our products with real data and look closely at every step to see how we can simplify and streamline the process at hand, in everything we do.