Problem: How might we enable someone to purchase goods and services without carrying a wallet or mobile phone?
Visa is a leader in innovative payment technology. As part of their innovation team, we imagined how a person might want to purchase goods or services without carrying a bulky wallet or large smartphone.
Solution: Enable a mobile payment method on their smartwatch.
Many Americans now have a smartwatch—as many as 16% of adults in the U.S. (as reported by The NPD Group, Inc.). They're especially useful as fitness trackers for runners and cyclists, and they make a convenient digital wallet for those who don't want to carrying anything bulky while exercising.
Project: Demonstrate the user flow for activating a credit card as a payment method on a smartwatch.
Because the interface of a smartwatch is tiny and difficult to use for data entry, a mobile phone must be used in the process. The primary benefit of using a phone is to capture the user's credit card number with the phone's camera.
User flow part 1
The following mockups illustrate the process of scanning the face of a credit card with a camera, reading the account number, and adding it as a payment method on the phone. However, the user must still manually enter required details such as the credit card's CVC security code and the account holder's ZIP code.
Mockup of an Android app, illustrating a method of adding a credit card as a payment method.
User flow part 2
After adding payment details to a smartphone, a user must still transfer them to a smartwatch. The technical term for this is called tokenization, which is the process of substituting a sensitive data element (such as a credit card number) with a non-sensitive equivalent, referred to as a token. The token has no extrinsic or exploitable meaning or value. Not only does this safeguard the user's credit card account, if they lose their smartwatch they won't also lose their credit card.
The following mockups illustrate the process of transferring a credit card token from a user's mobile phone to their smartwatch (given that the smartwatch has the corresponding app installed to receive it). The phone's mobile app first authorizes the smartwatch for use with the credit card and then activates it with a corresponding payment token. This effectively makes the smartwatch ready to use with a near-field communication (NFC) point-of-sale terminal at a retail shop or grocery store, without needing the card itself or a mobile phone.
Mockup illustrating the tokenization of a credit card number for use as a payment method on a smartwatch.