Designing Electronic Payment Systems: A User Perspective

The research aimed to investigate how Internet EPSs could be designed from the user perspective, so that end users will be willing to use the newly introduced payment systems in an e-commerce environment for payments and personal finance. To answer the research question, this thesis developed a classification and identified characteristics of electronic payment systems which were validated with end users by the means of the nation-wide users survey of more that 1300 respondents. Validated and beneficial design recommendations To inform and guide the design of EPSs a set of design recommendations for e-commerce electronic payment systems has been developed. These design recommendations were applied to an actual system from de Postbank (the Netherlands), in order to ensure they bring benefits to the design and user acceptance of electronic payment systems. As the result, most design recommendations were validated as beneficial to the system design and end users. The main contribution of this research is the deeper knowledge about electronic payment systems, user acceptance and interaction design of electronic payment systems, and design recommendations with the scientific evidence of their validity. The distinctive quality of this research is applying several research methodologies to answer one research question: literature research, a user survey, qualitative research, and a controlled laboratory experiment. The research benefited from cooperation with companies and organizations in the Netherlands like: De Consumentenbond, de Postbank, Interpay, and Comsys BV . The research approach and industrial participation suggests the high realism and validity of the research results.