Lovable online banking?
– posted April 9th, 2008 by Belen Barros Comments (5)
Paul Adams, a user researcher and design strategist, blogs over at re-frame.info/blog/. Recently, Paul didn’t have a particularly good customer experience with his bank and, consequently, is thinking of switching.
Coincidentally, at last week’s Search Marketing World, Morgan spoke about where online banking is on the scale of functional, usable and lovable.
Online banking, for the most part, is merely functional. This means, for a clever bank, there’s a huge opportunity to flip the funnel and create legions of satisfied and loyal customers through a better and “lovable” online banking experience.
As part of the preparation for Search Marketing World, Belen and I produced the following wireframes on what could be a better online banking experience. Our goal was simple, make what’s currently available much better. From a quick straw poll on twitter (backed up by some more rigourous Forrester research) and a look at the 37BetterBank we took the top three user goals: check balances, transfer funds and pay bills.
More usable: doing the banking basics better?
A new dashboard, user goals up top?
Better transfers?
More lovable: making data sexy?
Going even further, why do our banks not give us the mint.com experience and provide “analytics” on our account data? Why can’t we see our money in the way people now see web traffic data?
Something we need but would never ask for?
Hear Paul Adams speak on building experiences…
This topic dovetails nicely back to Paul Adams, who will be talking at the iQ Bootcamp FutureNow breakout session. His topic is on why successful businesses in the future will design and build experiences, not products or services.
For most businesses, designing a great website will not guarantee loyal customers.
One of the great business movements of the 20th century was ‘quality’. Quality goods led to satisfied customers, and an industry was built to guarantee quality goods. But in the 21st century, quality and customer satisfaction are commoditised. Anyone with an internet connection has product reviews and competitors’ information at their fingertips, and customer satisfaction is the minimum bar required to stay in business.
Differentiation in the 21st century will require a company to create meaningful experiences for people, and shift their position from satisfied to loyal. Designing these experiences will need to go beyond a great website, they will need to be created across multiple channels, and may require organisational change to be successful. This talk will explore this topic, using examples from the worlds of online news, car manufacturing and coffee.
5 comments so far
1. Michele on Apr 9th, 2008 - 13:41
I’d be happy if they let their branch staff use email instead of sending me out dead trees
2. Lar on Apr 11th, 2008 - 13:58
Hi Michele,
good point, it’s all about the simple things
LAr
3. Shay on Apr 14th, 2008 - 14:07
I would love the ability in online banking to set up folders (similar to email) into which I could divide up my funds…. and thus more easily track expendable income.
4. Bob Dejoria on Jul 8th, 2008 - 03:03
It may be about to change. Check out a small austin startup called Jwaala. They are doing just this with a very cool app for banks and credit unions. They’ve been winning some innovation awards and getting a lot of press. Actually gaining customers.
You can aggregate accounts, search like google, create infinite RSS or email alerts, create custom embeddable widgets and dashboards like igoogle. Its a very cool stuff and the way online banking should be.
Problem is the banks need to realize that this is what we want. They tend to approach it with the “no one is asking for it, therefore why should we invest in it” logic.
Hopefully they get past this antiquated perspective of things and hopefully this technology gets around. Because online banking today sucks!
IMO if they dont start looking at this technology they will lose out to the non bank online companies offering loans and such.
5. Andrew from Jwaala on Jul 8th, 2008 - 14:35
Thanks for the mention. We have some pretty great stuff implemented and deployed already, with a deep roadmap. Time to bring online banking into the world of iGoogle, RSS, widgets, search, etc!
Give us a ring (contactus[at]jwaala.com).