I was trying to buy a game on the Playstation Store today and it took me 1 hour to convince myself to go through the whole process.
Somehow I made it, but the amount of pain points in between were… too much. The checkout process is not problematic, but managing the payment methods was quite difficult. Things are scattered around their website.
I decided to run a heuristics evaluation using the Nielsen and Molich’s 10 rules of thumb.
1. Visibility of system status: ✖️
While adding a new card, the user has no clue how many steps are required to complete the process.
2. Match between system and the real world: ✔️
The text didn’t present any word unfamiliar to the target audience.
3. User control and freedom: ✔️
Users can easily exit this process with one click.
4. Consistency and standards: ✖️
The name for this process appears in two different places with different names. In the menu it’s called “Payment Management” and after clicking on it, it says “Payment Settings”.
5. Error prevention: ✔️
Since this process is quite simple, there aren’t confirmation options.
6. Recognition rather than recall: ✔️
This process doesn’t require a lot of memory load.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: ✖️
While adding a new card, the system requires the user to enter their full address every time.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design: ✔️
Due to the simplicity of this process, the overall design doesn’t require too much information.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: ✖️
There are no error messages, the system just prevents the user from moving to the next step. For example, if the user tries to continue while having errors or incompleted data on the form, the “Next” button remains disabled. It doesn’t tell the user what the problem is and doesn’t even show which fields are obligatory.
10. Help and documentation: ✔️
There are occasional tooltips that can be open with a tap.
After doing this quick evaluation, I did a quick prototype on Figma (this seemed a perfect exercise to practice on Figma) to try to make this a more pleasurable experience.
Of course it’s not perfect, this was me venting on Figma while waiting for the game to download.
Still, I tried to improve this flow:
There’s a lot of room for improvement here! I’m not better than any other designer and this is far from perfect. Here are some things I would have worked on if I gave myself more time:
Now that I got this off my chest, I’m finally going to play Horizon Zero Dawn.
