Tonight I went out for some late night shawarma with a friend. The payment machine at the store was down, and they were only accepting cash or e-transfers. The e-transfer had to be sent to a personal email belonging to a family member of the shawarma place owner. The email was long, hard to spell, and – in the opinion of shawarma place owner required capitalized letters (!?). Email doesn’t differentiate, but are you really going to argue with a very nice man who is about to feed you, provided that the payment goes through.
With a line of people waiting behind me, I wanted to complete the payment quickly, but the process was clunky.
Here’s what I had to do:
- Open the app
- Go to Payments
- Click “Send”
- Enter the amount
- Click “Select a Contact”
- Click “Add Contact”
- Click “Create”
- Add a name (for a payee I likely wouldn’t use again) and the email address
- Scroll to find the name that I just added (the app does not assume that user is going to send money to the contact that was just added into the payee list)
- Enter the amount again (if you enter the amount first, which is the first and most intuitive field, it won’t be saved, and you will have to enter it again)
- Double check that the amount is correct
- Click send
- Double check that it says “processing” to make sure that the payment was sent
- Wait
- Double check that the payment was received
- Get shawarma
I don’t know how you feel about it, but I feel that the number of steps between seeing the total amount and getting shawarma can be reduced. While I was able to complete the payment, it wasn’t a smooth experience in such a high-stakes, high-pressure, and time-sensitive situation.
I will call it the Shawarma Test.
The question is: Can a payment process be simple enough to complete in just a few taps, even when time is tight and conditions aren’t ideal? For example, could someone make a payment in 3 taps if they were at the end of a shawarma line or rushing to board a bus? Right now, the process feels prone to user error, requiring manual typing and multiple steps.
While this might not be a frequent use case, it is a stress test for product quality. If the system works smoothly in urgent and challenging conditions, it can handle everyday situations even better.
How could this be designed differently? Without reinventing the payment rails, this could have been a simple QR code for the user to scan with phone camera, the QR code is a payment link that would prompt the app to open with Face ID, automatically open the “send” screen where the only steps to complete would be to enter the amount and hit send. This could be done in a way where the payment is anonymous and shawarma place owner doesn’t need to know your name and email - and you don’t need to know theirs. Alternatively, the recipient could enter the amount on their phone and generate a QR code to scan - this would eliminate the step of entering the amount for the customer as it would be repopulated by the merchant.
This problem might not even be that rare. How many times you were not able to pay because the internet is down or Moneris/Global Payments/etc had some issue.
A well-built system would always work 24/7; just like the Neo app does not shut down for maintenance every Sunday, the app of the person/entity receiving funds could also come with Neo’s reliability; providing a service that just works when everything else fails.