PerceptNote Puts Banknote Designs to the Test

Design testing is not easy but is good practice. Ernesto Gonzalez Candela of Mexican firm UnderCurrency, which offers consulting services and products to assess and improve the performance of banknotes and coins, presented a new tool at the Optical and Digital Document Security conference in April to help central banks optimise their banknote designs and have confidence that they will perform in circulation.

PerceptNote™ adapts the logic of rapid iteration testing, widely used in software development, and applies it to banknotes. While focus groups are useful, they are complex to design and set up, time-consuming, expensive and mean sensitive designs are shared with people from outside of the central bank.

In the world of software, it is possible to show a small group of users a different version of software than is being shown, or used, by other users. This allows continuous real-time testing of subjective questions about design with answers based on data-driven social sciences. This is not possible with banknotes, of course, but PerceptNote achieves a similar outcome using software analysis.