How to Design an Onboarding Experience for Passive Wearable NFC Payment Devices

Abstract: The rapidly increasing popularity in wearables in combination with countries such as Sweden moving towards a cashless society creates a market for wearable payment devices. NFC technology is already used in traditional payment cards to provide contactless payment and is now also being used in other forms such as rings or bracelets to provide smart payment devices. However, despite NFC technology being commonly used consumers are not familiar with using the technology in alternative forms or connecting them with their smartphones. Something that Fidesmo, a Swedish company that provides a platform for wearable payment devices, has observed amongst their users. Fidesmo found that users faced so many problems attempting to link their payment card to their wearable on their own they no longer recommend users attempt this. This thesis aims to investigate this problem and present insights that can be utilized to create an effective onboarding experience. The onboarding experience aims to guide users through the following: connecting wearables to smartphones, linking a payment card to the wearable through the smartphone and how to use the wearable to make payment at a payment terminal. Through research into the field, traditional user research workshops and co-design workshops exploring the existing onboarding experience within Fidesmo’s smartphone application the following insights could be derived: Visualize Information, Thorough Instructions, Building Confidence, Celebrating Success, Locate "Connection Points", Designing the Physical and Relate to the Familiar. These insights are strongly indicated by the results and some are supported by previous research. A high fidelity prototype was designed using these insights to demonstrate how to apply them. During user tests the design proposed showed significant improvements compared to Fidesmo’s current onboarding experience.