Adding friction to frictionless payments: a haptic interface for digital transactions

Over the past decades monetary transactions have become increasingly dematerialized. Nowadays payments should be “frictionless”, as easy as possible, for example through NFC or biometric payment methods. Although frictionless payment methods hold advantages in terms of safety, convenience and privacy, they also pose problems as the inherent physicality of cash is shown to help people with budgeting and expense tracking. In this paper we describe our ongoing work in creating more mindful interactions, in this case by re-physicalizing part of digital transactions with the aim of combining the advantages of digital payment methods with those of physical money. We present the evaluation of a haptic interface for in-store digital payments. Results from a four-week lab evaluation indicate that people are capable of getting a feel for the absolute values of a payment as presented through our interface.