The Challenges of Usability in Online Banking – An outsider’s perspective
By Patrick Homan on 2009/11/04
Why the experience matters and how a few small changes could make the world of difference.
It is undeniable that we are increasingly living our lives online and are evolving from being submissive techno-newbies, just thrilled to be able to bank online, to being informed, need-it-now kind of people. From buying books and viewing photos to posting tweets, we are turning to the Internet more frequently and for a myriad of reasons. The financial services sector is certainly not immune to this digital migration.
Today, people want to be in a position to better manage their own personal finances. They want access to easy-to-use tools that can help (preferably free ones) and ones that don’t make them doubt their own abilities or competence. They are looking for guidance and advice that they can trust in an environment that makes them feel confident and satisfied about what they’re doing.
It is clear that online banking usage and adoption is growing, it is however less obvious how consumers view their current experience when interacting. Are consumers really satisfied with online banking functionality? Personally, I don’t think so.
At the very least, online banking should enable them to have total control over their own money and allow them to manage it as they please without stumbling over a silly ‘barrier’ called the user interface.
The truth is that many online banking environments, due to poor design, really are barriers. How frustrating!
While tons of effort and money has been thrown into improving the usability, functionality and general user experience of online banking services, the progress has been very slow in recent years. I’ve heard countless friends recalling nightmare experiences when it comes to online banking and started to question everyone I knew. Boy was I shocked! Out of the 27 people I spoke to about what they expected and how they experienced online banking, there was an overwhelming overlap in what they were saying that resonated quite powerfully for me.
People Need Help Managing Their Own Finances
- Why can’t customers see a simple graph of their spending when they log in to their online banking system?
- Why doesn’t the bank recommend a better savings or investment plan based on their current financial standing?
- Why don’t the banks make an attempt to automatically categorise their expenses, so that they can see where they might be overspending? Or at least, allow the users to do it themselves?
It has been theorised that the less the customer knows about managing their finances, the more they end up spending, even if it’s not in their best interest. Banks should place the customer at the centre of their transactions rather than the business goals.
The majority of respondents wanted to improve their financial planning and admitted they need help.
Implementing simple functionality like this can help customers manage their finances as individuals, but it is also an opportunity to raise the financial literacy of South Africans as a whole. Some banks have made some attempts at this, but most efforts don’t seem to be 100% successful because the designs are generally built and tested to meet their functional requirements and all too often aren’t tested adequately to see if they are easy enough and satisfying to use from a customer perspective.
Having an excellent understanding of what consumers actually need and want is critical to the success of online banking service development. Someone on the team needs to be able to empathise with the users and be able to speak on their behalf to ensure it’s built optimally for user needs.
Ensure That Functionality Is Easy To Find
I read a research report a while back and it should come as no surprise that usability and customer satisfaction are rated as the most important contributor to the success of online banking websites. The problem now is that financial services providers are adding more and more functionality and offerings to their websites to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. However, they are making it harder to use in the process, albeit unintentionally.
Users often have trouble finding the services. Creating a top-level category called “Other Services” might very well make the problem go away for the developers, but it certainly isn’t the answer for your users.
People can’t locate the tools what they need; and they don’t know how to use the ones they do find to full effect.
I believe that this issue arises because banks tend to be very project-driven. Individual project managers are often focused on delivering their project on time and within budget. Project managers are usually awarded by getting products to market, not on the customer experience of what they implement. As the funding models tend to be so project-centred, little thought is given to how the project fits into the broader context of online banking or how it contributes to a holistic customer experience.
Analytics Are Your Friend
Online banking service providers gather enormous volumes of website data to help them understand what people are doing on the site, which pages are more popular and which pages are not; which products are selling and which ones aren’t. They mostly use this information to report back on campaign successes and failures.
There is a lot more value that can be mined from the data to make them work harder for service providers and for customers. Simple functionality that can improve the user experience based on trends in the usage data (trends across the entire customer base as well as trends for individual users) can be automated.
Small incremental changes are often the best way to improve the user experience without massive development cost. And it is these small wins that will make all the difference.
For example, whenever I log into my online banking service I always do the same things - check my account balance and make my regular monthly utility payments and account transfers. So why do I always have to scroll down to find these beneficiaries in my profile, especially considering that they are split over 2 or 3 pages of listings? If they monitored my usage patterns, they could quite easily apply some smart filtering and place all of my regular beneficiaries at the top of the list. Such a small change could have a great impact on my experience with the site and make the whole process faster for me.
Business Benefits of Analytics – Cross-Sell And Up-Sell
Over time, carefully tracking how people use online banking results in powerful insights into customer needs and behaviour, product and campaign effectiveness and even purchasing or service trends. This information can help banks to better understand, target, and service various user segments, and identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
When carefully targeted, customers don’t perceive links to additional products or services as a sales pitch; they see them as useful links.
For example, if I am constantly maxing out my credit card and one day I see a link to increase my limit, I’m not going to get annoyed. I’m going to be pleased and the bank is going to get more business from me.
Appoint A User / Customer Experience Champion Within the Organisation
Banks need to think of themselves as purveyors of customer experiences and they need to become masters at it. Regardless of whether the customer interaction takes place inside a bank branch, at an ATM, on the phone or on the Web, the experience has to be superlative. A customer doesn’t just interact with a bank online. You might deal with a branch to sort out your bond registration, get a text alert when your balance is running low and phone the call centre when you want to ask about something in a statement.
To create a superlative customer experience across all these interactions – and there certainly is no avoiding it - there needs to be one person who is responsible for the overall customer experience across all their channels. One person.
After a long period of strong growth in the number of users of online banking services, the market is entering its next phase. The banks have no choice but to innovate, and the key success factor is going to be the customer experience.
I remember reading an article last year that said that approximately 60% of the people who have access to the Internet in South Africa, bank online. And in the 12 months preceding that, the total value of the transactions processed by just one of the local banks online banking service was more than R660-billion. Now imagine how much larger that number would get if the services were more user-centred and easy to use.
It goes without saying that a well designed service will generate more positive word of mouth, attract new customers and bridge the interface barrier, all of which would translate into more revenue for the banks. This money could then be used to fund further research into user needs and to ensure that the work being done is working toward the goal of creating an excellent user experience.
Thankfully, it seems there’s been a turn for the better and the competition in the local online banking sector seems to be hotting up once again. A few key industry players have beefed up their acts in the last year and a half and finally it seems as though there may be some pleasant experiences for us all in the future.
"For years, we've known about the importance of completing tasks. Not the items on your to-do list -- the users' tasks. What we found in our research over the last 10 years is that practically every measure of users' performance correlates strongly with the users completing their task. Users who achieve their objective believe the web site looks more professional, rate it as more fun, tell us it runs faster, and are more satisfied with the site. There's no doubt: if you want users to love your site, make sure they complete their tasks." - Jared Spool
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