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observing customer behavior, we find ways to enhance
our display screens to make people want to come back and
repeat the experience."

Make checkout invisible
Capoccia said market leaders Uber, Lyft and Amazon Go
stores are placing payment mechanisms behind the scenes
to make checkout invisible to their customers. These
examples illustrate how rapidly technology can change
and how mass adoption of cloud-based technologies is
Solving checkout, transforming the checkout experience for business owners
of all locations, types, and sizes, he noted.
retail's last mile "If you are anything like me, the few times you find yourself
taking a traditional taxi, your muscle memory causes you

By Dale S. Laszig to begin to exit the taxi before you realize that you still
need to pull out a credit card and pay," he added. "As we
DSL Direct LLC continue this trajectory, we will soon be able to walk in and
out of stores and complete our purchases without having
n his book How We Are, psychologist and author to think about it."
Vincent Deary examines how habitual behaviors
like walking and talking eventually become like Capoccia has observed that while payments' biggest
I apps running in the background of our lives. As an technology breakthroughs are intentionally subtle for the
example, Deary noted that on a routine trip to the grocer, everyday consumer, creating a simple, easy experience has
he pays little attention to his footsteps or the movement of been neither simple nor easy for technology companies
items from store shelves to his shopping cart. But when he and service providers, which have nevertheless delivered
enters the "crucible of the checkout," he begins the "atten- impressive results. "We're seeing more and more user
tion-heavy" part of his shopping journey. experiences emerge where the payments mechanism
operates behind the scenes and becomes more or less
"There was the self-consciousness of standing there with invisible to the end consumer," he said.
a queue behind me, of taking up people's time and of
figuring in their awareness," he wrote. "And then there Make checkout simple, even fun
was the attention to the actual task at hand: the counting The following examples demonstrate clear purpose and
out of change, trying to get the sum right, interacting with clean execution in action and show how companies can:
the checkout boy. This was the only truly deliberate part of
the whole buying-milk-at-the-shops affair, deliberate in the • Enable business discovery via online directories
sense of deliberated, thought out." such as Yelp, Facebook, and TripAdvisor
Checkout's fiery forge • Streamline commerce via well-designed in-app or
one-click purchasing flows like Amazon's, which
No customers should be afraid to enter a checkout lane, nor encourages consumer purchases by removing hassles
should they feel dumb or intimidated when they do. Cory and streamlining the buying experience
Capoccia, President of Womply, a software-as-a-service com- • Simplify banking via remote mobile check deposit.
pany, said a growing number of retailers are addressing
this issue by replacing legacy POS systems with intuitive, These winning strategies have helped the end user achieve
cloud-based solutions. their objective while saving time and freeing them to focus
energy in other personal or professional areas of their lives.
"Technology has tremendous power to either accelerate or
cripple businesses, depending on how it is implemented," "Technologies that miss the mark do so because of
Capoccia said. "In years past, technology required complexity or ambiguity in their core offering," Capoccia
purchasing boxed software, manual installation said. "Some examples include commerce enabled by clunky
through expensive third party consulting engagements, QR code scanning; card-linked reward programs that
implementing clunky hardware systems, and plenty of lack a broad acceptance base; most customer acquisition
additional and often unpleasant steps." or advertising solutions, which are too complex for the
everyday business owner to master to ensure a positive
Winston Fong, Chief Strategy Officer at global technology return on their investment; and legacy point-of-sale
company Castles Technology Co. Ltd., said, "People change solutions that are overly complex and costly to implement
their habits all the time. As device manufacturers, we want and use on an ongoing basis for busy business owners."
to get ahead of that and not make people feel dumb. By

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