Every single online checkout page—ever—asks you to input your credit card information in more or less the following way:

“What’s this?” leads to a page like this:

The CV2 / CSC / CVD / CVC / CCV / CV2 / Card Security Code / (…Seriously???) / CVV2 / Verification Code was implemented as a security measure for when you do transactions and the card isn’t physically present at the register (like when you’re buying menial crap on the internet).

But that doesn’t answer the question: Why does this page still exist? We’ve been doing this internet thing for well over a decade. People have pretty readily figured out what the Credit Card Number and Expiration Date. Why are we still struggling here? Isn’t this silly?

Two thoughts:

1) Label your crappy credit cards better. “Credit Card Number” is pretty intuitive because those numbers are big and imprinted. Every card I’ve ever had has said something like “Valid Until” or “Good Thru” or “Expiration Date” next to the expiration date, so that’s handled. Why the secrecy surrounding the CV2?

On this credit card, there’s no indication at all that the number 7379 has any significance whatsoever. With about fifteen seconds’ labor…

Any question now? This sample card wasn’t really designed too well; I added the white box to make it clear that “CV2:” was referring to 7379 and not 01001. With a little more thought and care, the two number series might be distanced and the white box rendered superfluous.

2) Pick a name. There’s obviously some serious confusion in this department—The Wikipedia page for “Card Security Code” lists seven different names with ten corresponding acronyms. Pick one! I’d lean towards “Verification Code” since I guess it’s a bit more intuitive (consider how much trickier it’d be to remember what an “EXD Code” was instead of an “Expiration Date”). I used “CV2” above for the sake of size. The face of a credit card has a pretty limited amount of real estate. And also I didn’t really feel like reorganizing and squeezing things around.