I just got done putting together a basic CC form for a project, and they insisted that we have a separate pulldown indicating what type of card the user was going to enter. I argued against it, and was voted down.
One of the justifications was, by forcing a pulldown, you're telling the people what cards are accepted. However, showing icons and text does the same thing. There are no good justifications for it, imo. But, until people stop coddling end users from 1996, we'll be stuck with bad form input habits.
For goodness' sake, I saw a RESET button today. And not just a regular RESET button, but a custom icon, about 50% the size of a normal input button, butted up next to the 50% smaller 'submit' button.
WHO ever says to themselves "hrm... shoot - I just entered in 40 instead of 50 in field 7 of 29 fields - I wish there was a way I could erase everything and start over!". No one was pining for that functionality in 1995, but for some reason we got it, and every browser maker since then has seen fit to faithfully recreate it.
Maybe framing your argument in terms of the direct value (or loss) to their business would have helped.
Maybe something along the lines of this:
"Of course, this is entirely your call. I just want to make sure that we're all on the same page about why I disagree with adding a separate pulldown.
By adding a separate pulldown, you're asking the user to make a choice. One of the choices they can make is to not complete their purchase.
Would you teach your retail cashiers to ask each customer if they were really sure that they wanted to buy today? Are they certain that today is the day to give your business money?
Because that's what adding an extra step to the checkout does. The only possible effect will be to decrease the number of customers that will complete a checkout.
I think that would be a terrible response. Without seeing test rests I'm not even sure no drop down is better considering it's entirely expected by users. Does something that insignificant really warrant such a snarky response? In fact the best stores that I go to always ask things like "did you find everything you were looking for?" before checking out.
no retail cashiers, but point taken, and that sort of was the point - forcing people to make more choices - to think about stuff - opens up the chance for them to choose to not buy, and/or make mistakes.
The user chose to be at this site, chose to pick an item to purchase and then chose to go into payment processing. The idea that suddenly an extra drop-down is going to outrage someone into questioning their entire choice-path is hugely unlikely, and infact the example here is a site that knows it's demographic won't be scared off by what seems at first glance to be a fairly ambiguous user input. If say Amazon tried this I would suggest their A/Bs would have this style of form failing for most demographics.
It's not a matter of outrage, it's a matter of momentum.
Every pause in the purchase process slows down the cognitive momentum of the user, which is why adding, say, forced registration before a checkout is a bad idea.
Admittedly, having to select your credit card from a drop-down is only a small speed bump, but why introduce it at all when there's no benefit and a very real downside?
I would argue there is benefit (what cards are accepted) and little downside. Without testing, I would not be prepared to make a definitive statement though.
Your opinion isn't any more justified. There is a strong case for having the selection be there. You'd be surprised what happens to the average user when you removes the credit card selection field, especially when you can't accept every single credit card out there. I've actually spent time with this.
If you really want to make a case for removing it, demonstrate with actual numbers how it will make the company more money.
As I mentioned in another reply, you have to have a client willing to pay for it.
My opinion is backed up with experience that problems end up being caused by people choosing "mastercard" but entering a visa number (for example). It's more errors that have to be dealt with, and causes confusion and in an earlier project, abandoned carts, or increase in phone calls to 800 numbers to talk to someone to place an order.
Can I say it was specifically that? No, but I did see higher than anticipated abandonment rates after wrong CC numbers/types were chosen.
But... hey... "that's not our site" and "our users are different". So... unless a client wants to pay for A/B testing (and wait for a statistically useful number of users to use both versions), they just go with whatever they want. And they'll rarely want to spend more money to prove themselves wrong.
"My opinion is backed up with experience that problems end up being caused by people choosing "mastercard" but entering a visa number (for example)."
I can back this up and I am pretty far way from being ignorant on this matters. The problem is that some on-the-fly internet credit card generators (like MBnet in Europe) can give you a credit card number without saying if it's a Visa or a Mastercard. It gets worse because they actually generate both types of card numbers. So whenever I am presented with one of those fields to choose a card I error 50% of the time. Annoying.
It's not enough for me to quit buying something but if you have also Visa Electron, Visa Debit and Visa Credit then I surely won't buy it, I would have to try so many combinations while filling parts of the form each time (because it won't keep the ccv, for example).
Now that you say it, maybe there is no difference between selecting one or the other? Well, there's at least one difference, some sites add a certain amount if you pay by credit card, right?
Your experience and what you were discussing are two issues entirely. Equating the two is a misunderstanding of the problem. Presenting a list of cards and throwing errors based on the select list are two things.
> I did see higher than anticipated abandonment rates after wrong CC numbers/types were chosen.
No. You didn't. What you saw was a higher than anticipated rate of abandonment after a user was presented with an error or told they'd entered an invalid number.
> So... unless a client wants to pay for A/B testing
That's true. But even still, you opinion is still heavily biased.
As someone mentioned, presenting the options via some mechanism (whether that be a select, or a list of images or something like it) doesn't necessitate throwing an error. PayPal, has mentioned, handles this gracefully.
> You'd be surprised what happens to the average user when you removes the credit card selection field, especially when you can't accept every single credit card out there.
PayPal handles this gracefully. There are icons of the (four?) types of CC they accept above the field. As you type, the ones ruled out by the first couple digits lose opacity and the card type you've entered remains displayed.
> No one was pining for that functionality in 1995, but for some reason we got it, and every browser maker since then has seen fit to faithfully recreate it.
Ever done some real data entry? Serious data entry, that is, where its all you do, all day. Thats where the RESET button came from - traditional data entry jobs, which, without that button, just wouldn't be as productive.
I concur it doesn't belong on a typically-not-optimized-for-quick-entry web form, but I wanted to point out that it is really very useful if you are doing a ton of data entry.
I bet it's used to wow clients who don't know web programming. "If you want to start over, just click this link and BOOM, everything empties out." Nevermind that, as you note, nobody ever wants to start over.
Chromium* has undo. Fill out an entire form and you can undo, redo the entire form change-by-change. Not sure about the other browsers as I don't use them with any regularity
One of the justifications was, by forcing a pulldown, you're telling the people what cards are accepted. However, showing icons and text does the same thing. There are no good justifications for it, imo. But, until people stop coddling end users from 1996, we'll be stuck with bad form input habits.
For goodness' sake, I saw a RESET button today. And not just a regular RESET button, but a custom icon, about 50% the size of a normal input button, butted up next to the 50% smaller 'submit' button.
WHO ever says to themselves "hrm... shoot - I just entered in 40 instead of 50 in field 7 of 29 fields - I wish there was a way I could erase everything and start over!". No one was pining for that functionality in 1995, but for some reason we got it, and every browser maker since then has seen fit to faithfully recreate it.
Sorry... slight tangent there...