Field research · Toss
FacePay
Watching the first time people pay with their face, in 100+ real shops
- Role
- FacePay Onboarding Assistant · Viva Republica (Toss)
- Period
- Jun – Aug 2025
Facial recognition works in a lab. The question is whether it survives a real shop at lunchtime — counter heights, light from the window, a queue building behind, and an owner asking why it isn’t working.
My job was to record that reality and hand it back in a form the engineering team could act on.
Method
- 01Field observation
First-time use, observed in live retail settings
- 02Merchant conversations
Collecting recurring issues and finding the pattern
- 03Issue relay
Passing UX and system-level issues to engineering
What I observed
When the screen stalls, the owner reaches for the old terminal
When recognition lagged, merchants instinctively reached for the existing card terminal — the very device FacePay was meant to replace.
“Wait time” was reframed from a technical metric into an interruption of how the shop actually runs.
Biometric payment trades convenience against exposure
A face is an credential you cannot rotate. I raised that irreversibility as a user-side risk, set against the convenience it buys.
A design proposal: show the state honestly
A proposal translating the observation back into a screen. If an invisible state is what creates the anxiety, then making the state visible is the first fix.
얼굴을 인식하고 있어요
70%
A static spinner becomes a ring with a percentage
A “recognise → confirm → done” rail
“Please wait…” becomes “We’re recognising your face”
A face authenticates; it does not consent — so confirm before charging
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