Payment verification pop-up

Customers believed they were submitting their order on Dell.com when they were actually just verifying their credit card payment.

Why did users think they submitted their order? And how do we redesign the checkout experience to eliminate that confusion?

In reviewing customer feedback and our own usability tests, I found that the “Submit” button on the final screen of the payment verification modal introduced confusion. So I cleaned up some of the redundant text in the modal and swapped “Submit” for “Continue.”

The results were better, but a new problem was introduced: users didn’t like landing on the checkout review page after completing the payment verification process without feedback as to whether the verification worked or not.

After a few redesigns with unsatisfactory results, I finally started to pick up on a pattern: users were looking for confirmation in the “payment” section after they completed the verification process. So, I stuck a quick “Success: Payment verified.” message bar there and we got the 100% order submission results we needed.

After 8 design recipes, we finally found a version that eliminated customer confusion over whether their order was submitted and made them confident that their payment was accepted.