Skeuocard

So…

* Didn't realize I had the name and expiration field to enter as well. I thought it was just show casing the number entry. It wasn't until I came back here to HN to read comments that I realized that there was more to the demo.

* Tab order was wrong.

* 1Password couldn't fill in the data.

* No indicator telling me what credit cards you accept.

* CVV was hidden. There were several cases where I'd finished filling out the form, but couldn't change the CVV.

* Errors are not displayed. Try 10/10 expiration, and you are basically stuck. Without additional information, there is nothing to indicate anything is wrong.

* You can tab from the date to the hidden CVV and enter information there, but you don't see it. This is easily done because the automatic progression is inconsistent, so I've had to tab twice before getting to the year, and because it automatically moves me there, I end up on the CVV. This makes things really awkward.

* Overall, this was fairly confusing. I failed at entering the CC data the first time.

I spent 10 years handling CC processing, and basically living on the payment page. Keep the page clean, quick, and simple. You don't want to do anything confusing. Let them enter the CC data and move on. That fancy CC form will NOT sell a single thing. It will however stop people from paying. It does nothing to convert.

The more friction you place between a customer willing to pay and the actual transaction, the less chance you have of making a sale.

Upvoting because this is so beautifully executed and I'd love to see people test this out on their checkout process.

That said, my experience indicates that this is not going to convert well.

To mirror the author's own quote:

"Every question a user has to ask themselves during the checkout process is another reason for them not to complete it."

What's presented here is a drastically different experience from the norm.

It doesn't behave the way you'd expect if you've ever bought anything else online.

Beyond that it has to load images dynamically based on card type which, on a slow or interrupted connection, will create even more confusion.

I love the concept, I love the execution, I just don't think this is going to be a conversion driver.

But I'll test it anyways.

It's a cute interaction, but for credit-card forms you want to be obvious rather than cute. Showing all the fields a user expects to fill out instills confidence and prevents questions like "where do I input my name and card expiry date?" "what about the security code?" "where is the billing address?" etc. People would typically not start filling out their credit-card details with those doubts in their minds.

One additional nitpick - it says "YourBank" at the beginning, so while I was aware this was supposed to a credit-card form because of the title of the submission, it can also be mistaken for a bank account number submission.

[Edit: original thread title was "why isn't every CC form like this?"]

Because it's completely unneeded.

Typical web designer wet dream. Fancy-schmancy visual design fluff, robbing screen real-estate and bandwidth for a freaking "credit card" background image, and will it still work even 2 or 5 years from now when all web dev standards have once again turned 180° and future browsers render stuff like this way-off or not at all? Oh it won't, but you web designer dude will happily fix this at a charge of only 1.5 man-days? Well, neat!

Don't get me wrong, it's fun to spend a week or three "optimizing" an approximate 0.000001% of your web app's UX with ideas like this. I get it. Been there, too.

I see another issue --- with the CC now looking more real, the user also gets closer to the "physical reality" of "I'm parting with cash". Once I see my card's logo I'm instantly more hesitant. It's been shown that the more "layers" away from real physical payment a transaction is, the "easier" a customer proceeds with it.

>Every question a user has to ask themselves during the checkout process is another reason for them not to complete it. (http://kenkeiter.com/2013/07/21/redesigning-credit-card-inpu...)

"Wait, where do I put the CVC, name and expiration date?"

I think this is a great concept that will need a few rounds of feedback and some live testing before it's ready for prime time. Many commenters here are saying the current format will lower conversion rates, and I agree with that, but I think the problems are correctable. I would love to see conversion rates on this thing, although that's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem.

My general attitude: it's trying too hard to look exactly like a credit card, and that makes it not enough like a normal form. Dial it back a notch or two. Have the fillable areas look like normal form fields, don't be afraid to explanatory or error labels on the form, and show front & back at the same time rather than a "flip" interaction.

On my iPad the auto progression doesn't work properly and the keyboard is hidden after each field. You have to tap all over the credit card.

I gave up after the fourth extraneous tap.

So I guess "why aren't all credit card forms like this" is because people use iPads.

(In all seriousness, great idea but disappointing first impression.)

We implemented a form very similar to this about 7 years ago. (our form had light red borders around all the required fields that turned green when they had been filled, as well as some other differences). I was personally very enthusiastic about the beautiful design and thought that users would appreciate the skeuomorphism. Well, they didn't really care. If anyone was delighted by the design, it was offset by having to figure out how to use a new format of form. The form was also more difficult for us to maintain and test against different browsers. So, in the end we went back to a standard form type.

I dislike this UI because it adds more questions[1] than it takes away. "Why did it tab? Why is it loading, did I accidentally submit? Why did the tab ordering jump down, then up?" Just show me a web form and put a picture of a VISA card somewhere static.

[1] Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug: http://www.sensible.com/dmmt.html

The part for me where it breaks down is when you have to flip the card to the back to fill in the CVC. I also hate when fields auto-tab for me. Also, why does it hide the expiration date and name fields initially?

If you paste "4111 1111 1111 1111" (with the spaces, from the very same page) it breaks.

I'll be sending you a pull request in a day or two. I work with dead, blind, hard of hearing, and visually impaired folks. I see a few places where accessibility could be improved with respect to screen readers.

Would you be open to a patch like that?

I like the general concept, but I think it relies on specific behavior to the point of being confusing.

* As others have mentioned, there's no advertising of accepted cards

* None of the empty inputs look like inputs until you tab into them. They also cease looking like inputs when you tab out. Correcting data that is not objectively invalid (e.g. expiration in the future, but wrong month) is kind of unintuitive. Someone who clicks into form fields will likely be entirely stumped by this form.

* It doesn't seem to work on mobile. On my iPhone the series of inputs were positively irritating to interact with, somehow each one only took three characters instead of four, and the lack of a tab meant I had little direction on where to go when the first four digit input disappeared.

* The CVV is clumsily poorly handled. You can actually tell in that you're breaking away from skeuomorphism to get the user to that input. It might be a better idea to show the "back" next to the card when you do the initial breakout.

I have always wanted card entry systems to know what kind of card it is - given that it's trivial to tell from the first few digits I never understood why not.

This is a great step up from that. The one thing I felt was not perfect was the multiple entry boxes for the different card types. Erasing/backspacing is not so easy. I would suggest a single entry field, and do something about adding padding spaces automagically. This also plays in to the auto-complete/form fillers these days. A credit card number is a single number, not 4 groups of numbers you copy and paste independently.

I don't think the UX is good as you think for the average user. For example, my mom (who is pretty good with a computer) would be so confused by this. I don't think she would understand that the credit card is interactive, especially after she maybe got past the first part of the credit card numbers.

I agree with others - I love the concept. However, I think for customers who are less enthusiastic and trusting in general, having a physical representation of their card built before their eyes will make them more acutely aware of the information that they're sharing, and be nervous that they're sharing it (even if they have limited reason to be nervous). In short, it will spook average customers. Maybe for a site that sold to a technology-focused crowd it would have more success though. Just my hunch.

It has the feeling of literally giving away my credit card to someone. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Plus, I don't know anyone anywhere anymore that's confused by a few credit card fields.

Plus, tabbing from the number goes to the name field and not the expiration.

Then you'll still have the problem of probably having to enter a valid billing address on separate fields.

I don't know if this really improves anything other than the aesthetic is very pretty.

I love it. Couple of suggestions:

You should use data urls or sprites for the CSS, then you don't have the the loading image coming in with delay.

Changing stuff once you have filled out the number is hard. You have to navigate your way back through the 4 blocks, and the auto-tab and the way it reacts to arrow keys means that the cursor doesn't end up where I anticipate it.

Interesting idea.

One bug I noticed: if you enter one of the sample numbers such that the number splits into multiple fields, then backspace starting from the end, you'll end up moved to the beginning of the first field with the first few digits still filled in, rather than backspacing over them.

More generally, any time you construct your own custom input rather than using browser input fields as designed, you end up with this kind of brokenness because you have to reimplement browser logic.

I'd love to see an <input type="creditcard">, with an input-creditcard.js polyfill, and native support added to browsers. On platforms that already know your credit card number, this would allow for simple auto-fill of all relevant information. This would also make life easier for things like Google Wallet that construct virtual credit cards for you, and it would allow for browser extensions that integrate with credit-card vendors to produce one-time tokens.

This reminds me of an habit I developed: I usually input the credit card number last. I usually start selecting the card issuer, then fill out my name, billing address, expiry date and CVV.

I love the concept. I love that it's smart enough to use a regex to figure out the card type.

As others have said, some minor instructional text would help people get started. Also, making the name and expiration fields more obvious from the start (more obvious that they're fields and more obvious that they will need to be filled out) would also be helpful.

Having to click to flip the card is probably the biggest problem (though fixable). Typically when filling out a form, I suspect most people use the tab key to go from field to field. Having to go back to the trackpad/mouse and click on a spot slows things down. Maybe have the card automatically flip if you hit tab after the expiration field?

Enough with the grey text.

#contrastrebellion http://www.contrastrebellion.com/

Can't ctrl+a to select the whole card number input textfield and type over it :-/

Most non-American cards use something like "Expiry" instead of "Good Thru", but apart from that minor string difference, it's pretty awesome.

Maybe you could get rid of the text entirely, MM/YY should be enough of a cue.

Backspacing in the middle of a number triggers a behavior which is very counterintuitive, particularly with the examples provided.

I think that this is very clever. Part of the value is the entertainment that it provides in a nominally soulcrushingly-dull task.

The major flaw (fail) for me is that LastPass doesn't know what to do with it.

Still, I passed to our dev team for consideration.

The field formatting stuff is great, but I think the interface to fill in the data on the card is monumentally confusing.

I do, however, like the idea of offering a "live preview" of data filled in via a normal credit card form (using the stripe checkout library for example which does all the nice card type detection and input formatting stuff for you).

This type of "preview" could also be useful in a confirmation step, ie. show the front and back of the card so the user can confirm it looks okay (I don't think there would be much advantage in "flipping" back and forth between front and back, though).

Entering CC info is last thing user does and that's the step you don't want to mess up - ever! This is one scenario where you want to stick to boring, well-accepted, well-known, highly familier UX and avoid performing fancy tricks because there could always be some case where it doesn't work as expected. For example, I tried to enter random numbers in this UX and I did not got any response that numbers were bad. Even worse, it did not enabled MM/DD. For some unknown CC this would mean loss of customer that you worked so hard to compete and ultimately acquire.

I really like this EXCEPT for the awful image loading. It should preload the images up front as a single sprite and swap them in and out as needed.

Beautiful project. I agree with others who don't think this will drive conversion - who knows...

I would be concerned about reducing conversions though. Unfamiliarity can be scary.

One annoyance for me - I can't hit Command-A to select everything and start over. I'm also annoyed generally by auto-advancing text fields, though this implementation seems to work around some of the issues.

I have a bit of a pet peeve for apps that try to customize form fields, because they almost always get the corner cases wrong. Here, for instance, select all doesn't work as expected. (In fact, selection doesn't work at all. Skeuocard, like many overly-clever widgets, will overwrite your selection to put the cursor where it thinks it should go.

It's very good, but the OCR font is going a little too far for me.

"simply enter your card number"

It's horribly wrong to even suggest that. The instructions should say "type 4111.... I don't want your credit card number", and should pop up an error if a valid checksummed card number is entered. Don't miss an opportunity to help people lean safe habits.

My only complain is that it auto-progresses across sections of inputs (between month and year in the expiration for example) it does not auto-progress when you reach the end of one form. I found that jarring. If you are going to auto-progress in one place, you probably should across the board.

Very nice! To make it better:

- ALL of the inputs should look like inputs and only after a user has put in their information should the input ui disappear and the text be shown as it is on a real credit card. Otherwise the ability to enter your name and expiration is ambiguous.

- I don't like how AFTER you enter your full credit card number, the input fields become segregated, trying to change the credit card number becomes difficult as you now have to click on each of the 4 new text fields to enter a new credit card number. (If a card fails to go through a user might try to use a new one). Yes you can just hold down BackSpace and it will travel from field to field deleting the number but that's not obvious for a user to figure out. Don't segregate the numbers into separate fields just leave them in one.

I believe there's an algorithm to determine if a card number is valid (before determining if the other credentials are correct). Implementing that would probably be the most useful thing you could do in Skeuocard, as it helps people find typos in an otherwise inscrutable list of numbers.

I wouldn't use a form where the fields displayed change as you enter things.

That said, I totally agree with the premise. I'm totally baffled why so many forms require you to unnecessarily select a card type or insist that you enter a number with spaces or only without spaces.

There's a lot of negative reactions on here, and some of them might be valid (unfamiliarity, any friction reduces sales).

But I liked the concept. The "flip over for CVC" worked for me on Firefox, and that was an elegant solution. I think a lot of the criticism could be avoided by just making it static: don't load the image and redraw the card based on the input numbers. It then boils down to, essentially, the image of a generic card with some generic fields on it. Add some red text for fields that require input, and I think it's an elegant way to guide people when entering CC info. I'd be interested if anyone did A/B testing with this variant (and others) against regular forms.

I love the idea, but since nobody does this, the average user would be skeptical. If it were used on the iPad, people might be more comfortable, since the iPad is a new medium and (most) people accept new concepts like Square as acceptable and secure.

FYI: 4147 2011 1111 1111 triggers the special Chase Sapphire layout (number is on the back of the card, front just has your name + the Chase Sapphire (Preferred)).

I actually find the lack of any label on the CVV field a bit confusing, but maybe that's just me.

Very nice work. I've done lots of work with credit card fields because I work for a large non-profit that depends on credit card donations. I might just use this in the next iteration of our form. Good idea doing the detection in realtime.

My only gripe would be that it doesn't innately explain which cards are acceptable... E.g., you might not accept Diners Club and Discover, but do want to accept Visa, MC, and Amex. Having little icons there make that more explainable. We did it like that on our contribution form: https://contribute.publicradio.org/contribute.php

FYI: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/33411/what-are-the-pro...

After the last number is entered, you should auto focus the NAME field, then EXP DATE or the purchaser won't know what to do. People may think... hey, it guess my card type, how come it's not automatically showing my name?

This is amazing. I do think there's a lack of breaking the norm in web practices (for several good reasons, but not enough), resulting in us not taking advantage of what the most amazing newest iterations of the internet can offer. This is a good change in the right direction. I'm sure there'll be kinks, but fixable kinks.

NB: I comment on amazing HN submissions (Show HNs usually) primarily so that I can find these tools again by browsing my comments from my profile when I feel the need to use them. This is primarily a comment to that end. Thank you so much for this Ken!

On my android with firefox it very was easy to see that the XXXX was an input-box that had to be filled in because each field had a small frame around it, i was surprised to see so many having trouble understanding it. Then i tried in my desktop browser (firefox, chrome and ie) and there there is no frame around the unfocused input fields, the numbers stand alone making it look like a static image of a credit card, except when the fields are focused. This little change made the experience much worse, i suggest always showing the frames around the fields.

Small bug report: This works very poorly (not useable) in Chrome Version 21.0.1180.90, which is the last one available on macosx 10.5. You probably want to fall back to form fields on untested browsers.

Perhaps existing forms make you select the type of card as an extra check.

I love this. couple of things you may want to test - either show all the fields (cc number, exp, name etc) by default, or dont show the name, expiration fields until the credit card number has been filled... its slightly surprising that the other fields show up after entering 5 or 6 digits... also, it is not very clear that I can click and enter the name, expiration date (as it was for cc number)... you may want to move the user directly to the next field after they have entered the previous field.

This is really good.

However, there is a few things that makes me not want to use it.

Firstly, no security code.

Secondly, it's hard to tell which fields aren't being filled out. Especially the YOUR NAME in particular. Maybe you should make these fields red, or when you complete a field it automatically goes to the next field. For example, when you finish typing in your credit card number the cursor automatically goes to the expiration date, and when you finish typing the expiration date it automatically goes to the name. Just a suggestion.

One issue I see is that very frequently on many pages there's not only distinction between say Mastercard or Visa, but also between different types of them. If you have Mastercard FooCompany Partner Card, then you pay less commission etc. Not sure if those partner types can be confronted with a regex (anyone from CC company there? :)

Usually those granular types are on a select list, if one chooses badly, she gots "transaction refused" without any more info (clearly not nice).

Failure on copy-paste. Fix it ! :) And try to keep it in 1 box. Perfectly possible without hurting functionality: Just use css word-spacing. (And auto-add spaces where needed.)

My only suggestion is to use hinting once the card number input is complete to suggest the user then fill out the name and expiration date. Also I think when pressing tab to go to the next input, you should have the order be:

card number -> expiration date -> name

instead of the current order of number, name, date.

It's a really slick implementation, I love the flipping animation, I used an extremely similar animation setup (face front/face back, and a flip property) on a site I built.

It looks good, but is completely broken when using a password manager such as Dashlane. The icons indicating auto-populating fields move all over the place, etc.

This is really cute. But I hope noone ever actually uses it :) Too much guesswork and dynamism, violating important design principles IMO. But a nice demo.

One thing lacking in this design is that without extra supporting content, it doesn't tell the user upfront what kinds of credit cards are supported. So if a user prefers to use American Express, they have to find the card and start entering a few digits before being told they have to try a different card (and then they may have some apprehension about if that other type of card is supported or not.)

I found it awkward and annoying to use , so not a winner. Its a good idea but unfortunately it just doesn't come off , keep on trying though.

This looks great, but is it great for us that are good with technology or will it work for your parents too?

And what happens if javascript is disabled?

Because it's really hard to use due to a lack of affordance letting the user know how they are supposed to interact with it.

Looks nice and I'm glad to see someone rethinking this interface.

Not something I'd use right now. It's too clunky compared to just having some textboxs on the page. I'm not a fan of skeuomorphism in general though, so I'm probably a hard sell.

Doesn't mean you shouldn't keep trying. Thanks for putting this out there. I love the article, btw.

I like it except for the card flip with the hidden field on the back. Maybe show back and front at the same time with 2 cards.

I like what you guys are doing. I had this same idea when I started Noca (www.noca.com ) - precursor to stripe.com, braintree.com etc. The idea was to show the card logo bank from the BIN as the customer types the card number. Go for it. The payments User Experience needs improvement and glad you guys are doing it

I'm 23 years young and I cannot read your text. Why is your background white and your text light-gray?

I have all 3 cards (AmEx, Visa, Mastercard) and I can see the full form and along with the validations, given an AmEx card. Is there any particular reason why the same can't be done with the Visa and Mastercard?

Regardless, fantastic piece of code! Will definitely think of incorporating this.

I feel like if we were to implement this on our ecommerce site, we would loose millions. That said, it does have potential for displaying saved credit card information in a nice layout.

As for the input, the standard forms that we grew used to are probably here to stay for a little longer.

Looks great, but having to flip the card over to enter the CVV code is a huge usability hit for me.

American Express used to do this when you mistyped passwords a few times and were locked out of your online account (they may still do it for membership rewards). It put text boxes in the areas for the CVV and the card number (with an Amex card in the background)

Really nice idea and implementation. Lovely thing. But I will never use it on real product. Makes easier to match on request (since you know what library will be required from server) and patch it on the fly. So credit card data can be stolen.

Square on iOS has had a similar input since it first came out. Its a great way to enter credit card numbers on a mobile phone where you don't have a tab key etc.

Making the whole thing look like a credit card doesn't seem necessary at all.

It's a bit gimmicky but I think the subconscious (or even conscious) association people make with the card they're holding in their hand makes it less prone to mistakes and a bit easier to use. I like it.

I agree with many that this is very well done. I would like to see some usability tests to see if there would be as much confusion as I expect.

Without great experiments like these, there would be no progression. Kudos to Ken.

Awesome idea. Beautiful design.

Small bug: Amex cards have 4 digit CCV. Although you do show "XXXX" (4 digits) before I start typing, when I get to that field I can only type "123" (3 digits).

I had this idea a while back, didn't execute well: https://github.com/asselinpaul/cc_validate

I never thought of this before, but the first 4 digits of my credit card number revealing the issuing bank seems insecure to me. That's not a fault of the op's program, of course.

Too long to load. Failed loading first time on iPhone. Keep It Simple.

I love this idea and I will test it for sure! I will let you know when I do. For consistency I will also add a letter background to get the billing address. Nice work mate!

It likes my month of 99

What suprise me most is why the heck has it not been the DEFAULT way to do this for years!? Disruptive, so it might frighten some users. But so awesome. .. .

SO MUCH WHINING! Holy shit people, if you have a problem, fork the damn thing and do something about it! shakes head

Nitpick: the backgrounds are a whopping 992 × 624, ~180 KB. This makes loading and rendering not as smooth as it could be.

The security code on the backside could use some improving on how it looks. Other than that, this is a really cool idea!

Naysayers aside I think it'd be neat if it went even further and switched to an IIN-specific layout.

I don't think it's a good idea... but at least it should look exactly like my credit card.

That's beautiful. Good job!

Stripes form for iOS is the GOAT

You could two-way bind this with a traditional payment form and end up with something that's useful in the traditional case (feedback about whether the data you're typing is going in the right place), and may delight users who understand what they're seeing and choose to interact with it.

It was a bit flaky on Android.

That's so clever it ticks my "creepy" box. Well done... sorta.

Fantastic.

I can think of all sorts of ways for it to drop conversions if it fails, but it is so perfectly done that I kind of don't care.

I'm going to keep an eye on this because it has the potential to really increase the comfort people have when entering a credit card. And because it is beautiful.

I'm pretty sure Bonobos uses something like this. Really slick.

Doesn't seem to be working using the keyboard numpad.

There's a distinct lack of support for the num pad.

The order feels off.

Thank you for sharing this. It's beautiful.

Nice. Works without javascript, too!

This is fantastic.

Nice work Ken!

Diner's Club still exists??

The main problem, and many designers make that mistake, is that you're modeling a physical thing inside an app for no good reason.

Other than the nice visuals it doesn't help anything.

As a designer, you should think of how to make the process of entering the CC more efficient and less distracting, so your conversions don't go down the drain.

A simple clean design with standard input fields will outdo your pretty design any day of the week.

p.s. Does your design even work if JS is disabled?