{"id":231,"date":"2009-02-05T12:10:41","date_gmt":"2009-02-05T17:10:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/05\/better-designed-credit-card-readers\/"},"modified":"2009-02-12T20:59:55","modified_gmt":"2009-02-13T01:59:55","slug":"better-designed-credit-card-readers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/05\/better-designed-credit-card-readers\/","title":{"rendered":"Better Designed Credit Card Readers"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a great comment thread on designing credit-card readers to be more obvious<\/a>, over at uiandus.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And this one, from Chris Clark<\/a>, sounded the most cost-effective and simple to me<\/em>,<\/p>\n

An idea: put the scanning mechanism into the main body of the machine (in this case, the left) and give the inactive side of the swiping channel a very low profile.<\/p>\n

\"20090205-brup972kd9i3m7w4ykms5erwt4.preview.jpg.png\"<\/p>\n

The channel should be deep enough that your card doesn\u2019t spill out during a swipe, but shallow enough that you can see that the magnetic strip won\u2019t be touching anything if you slide your card with the strip facing \u2018out.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

If people work with the assumption that the magnetic strip must touch something to work, this design removes the perceived affordance of the \u2018wrong\u2019 side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You could get the same effect by using clear plastic on just the “short” side. But I prefer Chris’ concept, because clear plastic will get dirty, scratched, and opaque, but empty space will stay empty.<\/p>\n

There are lots of great comments, and I don’t know enough about building these things to know which plan would give the most bang for the buck<\/a> in reality. So if this problem interests you read the blog<\/a> and pick a winner for yourself.<\/p>\n

(UPDATED 2009-02-12: I wanted to clarify why I’m ignoring the most obvious and right answer, of having a sensor in each side of the machine, so there wouldn’t be a wrong way to swipe the card. My understanding is that doing that would be too costly. If that isn’t the case, then I’m deeply<\/em> disappointed in every credit-card reader I’ve used, and the cheap bastards who opted to save a few bucks to inconvenience all their customers.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a great comment thread on designing credit-card readers to be more obvious, over at uiandus.com. And this one, from Chris Clark, sounded the most cost-effective and simple to me, An idea: put the scanning mechanism into the main body of the machine (in this case, the left) and give the inactive side of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8],"tags":[329,330,331],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-usability","tag-credit-cards","tag-industrial-design","tag-point-of-sale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}