Friday, May 15, 2009
Transaction alerting
After paying my utility bills this morning, I pulled out my phone, half-expecting an SMS alert confirming the transaction. None arrived. Of course, I told myself, I had paid in cash. There was nothing correlating the cash to my phone number. The bills were for a rented apartment; not in my name.
And yet, it was a bit disconcerting. Transaction alerts for card transactions, ATM withdrawals and mobile bill payments/top-ups are so commonplace now that it feels incomplete to not receive one.
Why is this so? After I had handed over cash at the payment centre, I had waited to collect a paper receipt. The receipt represented several things:
- Confirmation that the cash was going to the utility company and not the cashier’s pocket;
- To a younger, adolescent self, confirmation to parent that I had completed the assigned task;
- A record for my accounts and for applicable reimbursements; and
- The sense that if a piece of paper with some numbers printed on it could be acceptable to all parties, then all is normal.
The SMS alert meets all but the third and adds an additional representation:
- Confirmation that the transaction loop is complete, that the payment has gone into the authoritative record, not just the cashier’s computer.
Something to think about when designing for user experience.