What I learned writing payment interfaces

I'm scheduled to give a 15-minute presentation in a few days, and this is the first time in a few years that I will have given a formal presentation at a technology conference. Formal presentations in past conferences focused on making technology accessible to people who are not generally technically savvy, and any other presentations I've given have been more like 'brown bag' or 'lunch and learn' - which match my laid-back style, so this is the first time in a long time that I've spoken formally to people who are geeks like me. It's a little unnerving.

The topic for this upcoming venture is basically the simple lessons I've learned by writing payment interfaces over 7 years (with releases every 2-4 weeks)...so maybe 15 minutes isn't long enough to say everything, but it may very well be too long in other ways.

The conference is for UI engineers; however, I think the lessons are applicable to more than just UI engineers, after all, it's not like it's a 'how to' for HTML, CSS, or JavaScript - there are enough of those - so I will be posting all 5 lessons here in the near future. As a bit of a spoiler, I will tell you that conversion (the measure of how many potential payments are converted into actual payments - sort of like how many people actually pay the cashier after getting into the checkout line) has a direct relationship to how fast the checkout process is - something you already know if you've read my Faster, faster, faster post from February of this year.

Anyway, look in the coming days for the rest of the What I learned writing payment interfaces series...I'll try to not disappoint.