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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Chip is not especially hard to use, but it's unquestionably a worse and slower interface.

With a swipe you can do it while they are still scanning your items, and you can swipe and immediately put it back in your pocket.

With a chip you have to wait till they are done, and you have to wait about 5 to 10 seconds for it to do its thing - then sign it, while the card is still in there (so you can't really keep holding your wallet since you'll need two hands, one to hold the machine, the other for the pen).

Then finally it lets you remove the card. And you have to take out your wallet again and put it back.

Swipe uses exactly zero time, since you do it while you are anyway waiting.

Chip takes about 30 seconds. It adds up. It's also more annoying since you can't just put the card right back in your wallet.

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I'm curious. Is this common in the US for terminals to operate that way?

In Russia, POS terminals are connected to cash registers, and only initialize after the items are registered - I think I never ever saw them active prior to the final cost display. Only then you can swipe (or insert) the card. Probably that's just a local specifics, so I'm interested in learning how this works in other countries.

The larger the store the more likely you can swipe right away.

In smaller places typically you have to wait for a total.

Well there's NFC. You put all your groceries into your bag once they scanned them, you tell them you want to pay by card, hold it in front of the terminal, enter the pin, done. Yes it takes 2-3 seconds until you can enter the pin (only if amount > 25€) and then another 2-3s for it to very it, but during that you can just go back to putting things in your bag. If you want to you can also get a thin wallet and not even take your card out at all. You're also overcomplicating the whole chip & pin/sign process by a lot. If the machines are simply mounted somewhere all you need is two fingers to hold/insert your card and then one of them to enter the pin or one hand to sign if your bank is weird. It's like you really want to see problems with the system. It works fine in other countries.

It varies. I've been to locations where you can swipe as soon as the first item is scanned and others where it won't accept it until the end. The one certainty is there will be no consistency in the payment flow between more than a few businesses.

I think part of it is chip & signature vs chip & pin UX because this doesn't seem to be an issue in Europe (I also remember their chip reading being significantly faster...but maybe that's an illusion?). There's a story about the Houston airport where people complained that their luggage took too long at the new terminal. They created a longer route for people to walk from the plane to the luggage carousel and the complaints went away.

If I remember correctly, with chip & pin you put in the card, type your pin, then remove your card. With chip & signature you put in your card, wait, after a receipt is printed out (or the screen prompts you) you scribble something that may or may not resemble your name so you can leave.

Personally, I want to use ApplePay/GooglePay but it's slower and more awkward only because I'm not sure if the terminal accepts it. I can get out my wallet and my credit card knowing it'll be accepted. With ApplePay/GooglePay I have to wait, possibly put my wallet away, pull out my phone and pop up the screen.

I can confirm, chip takes what feels like forever. You put it in and wait for probably 30 seconds until the machine starts making annoying sounds for you to remove the card.

With a swipe, half the time when I'm done sliding my card through it's already prompting me for my pin. This time difference occurs at self checkouts so I know it has nothing to do with a cashier.

Eventually I figured out using NFC is significantly faster but not everyone has them :(

The interface you’re describing is chip and signature.

Chip and Pin isn’t the same UX/flow as Chip and Sig.

We (US) currently chose the worst of both worlds.

What's the Chip and Pin interface? How does it vary from Chip and Signature?

Chip: "something you have" factor. The card has a tamper-resistant chip, that holds cryptographic keys and does the signing.

Pin: "something you know" factor. Card owner enters a PIN code on the POS terminal's keypad. The card only allows the transaction after the correct PIN entry, and blocks in case of multiple errors.

No signatures required in this scheme. Except for the cryptographic ones, of course.

It works like this: you insert the card, type in[1] your PIN code that is supposed to be secret and then the purchase is authorized.

Requirement to enter the PIN lessens the fraud possibility in case of lost or stolen cards, and requirement to have the chip combats skimmers (if terminal is capable and card has a chip, swiping the magstripe instead of using the chip should result in rejection).

______

[1] If prompted. Depending on the bank, infrequent low-cost low-risk purchases may not require a PIN code. Card keeps a list of recent purchases in the EEPROM and is probably capable of starting to ask the PIN code after number of purchases is over some threshold (but I'm not exactly sure how they're programmed).

That's the same interface as Chip and Signature, except you enter a PIN instead of scribbling on the screen.

Terretta made it sound like there was a large difference.

Well, card's MCU cannot validate the signature, but it can (and does) validate the PIN code.

With chip+sign, if you lost the card, anyone can use it. They'll just draw something remotely resembling the signature on card (if there's any) and that's it. With chip+PIN, this isn't possible.

I think that's a significant difference.

That is a difference, but it's not what I asked (because I already know about the security difference).

He made it sound like there was a UI difference especially as regards transaction speed and convenience.

There is. You insert card, type pin, hit enter, in one step. All that back and forth and waiting around in your UX discussion is for signatures done at a different step. This is most obvious when the chip reader doesn’t have a stylus and you’re waiting for bits of paper and signing those instead.

It’ll really hit home in European cafes vs US restaurants.

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