Tesco club card app
by Gavin Wye
Tesco recently launched their Clubcard App for the iPhone, Ben Dodson tweeted about it on Monday and summed up how effective and simple the app is. I'm in complete agreement with him about the effectiveness of the app but what I think is more interesting is the fact that customer will have to hand their iPhone over to a complete stranger in order for them to scan the barcode. In my opinion thats a big ask. I'm okay lending my phone to close friends but handing it over to a stranger thats a prized possession they now have in their hand a thing of beauty that I cherish. What if they drop it? I haven't tried this yet but I'm going to tonight. so I'll report back.
This app paves the way for mobile payment systems. I've been thinking about this recently at work and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered about how you actually get consumers to feel safe using this kind of technology. It needs some very good interaction and product design combined to come up with an effective solution.
Back to the app, it's quite nice to set up the only thing that I think they could have done better was to go and get the card number for me once I had put my name in. It's relatively long card number and not split in to manageable chunks like a credit card number so I had to get it read out to me.
Anyway I'm off to Tescos to try it out.
3 comments
Feb 19, 2010
cherry.leong said...
The instruction of the app says "Please scan yourself and do not hand over to the operator". So I think this app is mainly for self-serving counters. But I think do they should make this instruction more prominent or, like you said, brief their staff about it.
Feb 19, 2010
Gavin Wye said...
Thanks Cherry.But I didn't read the manual, I don't expect to have to. I saw a barcode and knew what to do with it. Explaining it like that is just lazy they should have solved that problem through design. Not one sentence in the FAQ.
Gav
Cashier: Do you have a club card?
Me: Yes here you go.
Cashier: That won't scan! (Scans it anyway with her hand held scanner my phone didn't leave my hand) Oh that's good isn't it.
Me: Thanks.
Cashier: There's and app for that (iPhone advert style).
So I didn't have to hand over my phone like I was expecting but it did make me associate my phone with the transaction. It's only a step away from making a payment with it.
However it did point out the fact that Tesco need to brief their staff about the app. Especially as the app is on the front page of the app store.