Usability for Online Banking Applications

Imagine: “a user lands up on a bank’s website where he is not able to find the desired product or services as quickly as he expected? “. For example, someone who wants to apply for a credit card online is not able to see a link which “clearly” identifies itself as a link to Credit card section! What would he do next? He may simply close the page or may check competitor’s website!

23% of the consumers who applied online for a financial product would not have opened the account at all if there wasn’t an online application.“  Forrester Research, March 17, 2008

Bad usability can cost you a lot!

If your bank’s website or an e-banking application does not match the user’s mental model, he will get frustrate and may stop using the application or reduce the usage by using alternative channels to do the same transaction which will increase other costs for the banks, like customer support phone calls, branch-based support & more, which ultimately leads to a bad ROI for the banking website or application. This lost business could account for a big amount for the bank.

Research shows that 50% of prospective customers registering for online banking leave the website before signing up, mostly due to several issues like difficult navigation, problems faced in completing online forms, security concerns and also understanding content and feedback / error messages.

Users like those sites which matches their mental model to maximum possible extent. Such sites, especially Banking website, needs to concentrate more on usability rather the visual pleasure, as these are meant to do business, not to entertain the end-user with funny videos.

Banking websites generally have 3 core areas in which they need to concentrate a lot:

1. Static Information Page / Brochure-ware (Type of Accounts, how to open a savings account, features, etc.)

2. Online Applications for Banking services (Apply for a Savings Account Online, Apply for Credit Cards online, etc.)

3. Transactional Applications (applications like e-Transfers, Online Bill Payments, etc.)

We will discuss some of these issues which end-users faces while using either of these application areas.

Issues in banking applications’ user experience:

1. Improper, inconsistent navigation design (that makes users’ life difficult while using the website.

2. Visual designs & elements used improperly, that has no visual connect with its own parent or sub sections.

3. People like to search! Websites with bad search engines built-in create a bad user experience for the users.

4. Usage of technical jargon / heavy usage of banking terms with no explanations makes users’ life tough.

5. Badly designed forms (design in terms of usability and accessibility). Also, a feedback and error message which doesn’t look like error messages makes it difficult for the user to identify ‘what happened now’.

6. Users may prefer to save the form which they filled in to complete it later. Incapability to provide such assistance to the user may result in to the lost customer. Also, steps not clearly indicated keeps user unaware of how much is still left and may simply close the browser before he proceeds to the next page.

7. Bad transaction flows (that includes unnecessary steps or information that’s really not required or is of no use for bank to capitalize on).

8. Accessibility issues for people for visual / cognitive impairments.

In the next post, we will discuss more about how we can help ourselves by helping end-users. I would request you to submit your obeservations and comments on the same.