Mastercard

Mastercard’s Touchcard is a payment card designed for people with visual impairments. The design question I worked on: how can it enable secure, independent transactions — without a cardholder having to rely on someone else to verify what’s happening with their card?

I mapped the journeys that answer it.

Paying confidently, without sight, in three hard places

For a blind or low-vision cardholder, the risk isn’t abstract — it’s the moment of payment. We focused on three high-stakes scenarios: an in-store retail checkout, an online purchase, and a shared group payment split with friends.

In each, the core concern is security: without a way to verify card access or oversight, cardholders are forced to trust others with sensitive information. The goal was to design that trust back into their own hands.

Map the whole journey through a low-vision lens

I treated the three scenarios not as separate problems but as chapters of one experience — viewed deliberately from the perspective of the people Touchcard is for.

• 1Studied what exists. Competitive analysis of related products — active and discontinued — surfaced features like tangible printed elements and biometric integration that support accessibility.
• 2Grounded ideation in real voices. Drew on existing user interviews and product reviews rather than assumptions.
• 3Pressure-tested the narratives. Brainstormed scenario-specific solutions through journey mapping, then tested the stories with the client and volunteers to find the pain points.
• 4Documented deeply. Detailed user journeys mapping key moments, thoughts and emotions, goals, safety concerns, pain points, and related resources.

Journeys that hand control back to the cardholder

The work produced detailed, scenario-specific user journeys — personas, key moments, and accessibility solutions — that give Mastercard a clear, human picture of how Touchcard performs where it matters most: the point of payment.

It turns an accessible card into the foundation of an accessible experience — one where cardholders don’t have to trust anyone else to pay with confidence.

Designed for the people usually designed around

The impact of inclusive work is measured in who it includes — and in giving Mastercard a human, end-to-end view of independent, secure payment for blind and low-vision cardholders.

Touchcard reinforced what I carry into every project: inclusive design isn’t a separate discipline, it’s design done honestly. Map an experience through the eyes of the person it excludes, and you don’t just help them — you surface the friction everyone was quietly tolerating.