|
In February 2003, The Usability Company was asked to undertake usability research on three financial services sites by Financial Marketing magazine.
The purpose of this research was to gauge the usability of some of the top financial services sites and to gain an understanding of some of the customer issues for the over 50s or "silver surfers". The Usability Company was interested in understanding if this often ignored part of the online community had any specific problems in finding suitable products in the financial services market.
The Usability Company's standard and methodical approach to Usability Evaluation was used for this study. This research comprised giving the task of finding a suitable car insurance quote to over 50s, who are part of the sites' target audience. Each participant was given details of a retired person age 65 with a modern car. The Usability Specialist, when analysing and interpreting the results of the testing, also employed some Usability Audit techniques, such as comparison with best practice on the web and standard design heuristics.
The three key areas of site design identified and assessed that might affect silver surfers were:
- The categorisation of products suitable for potential customers who are over 50
- The impact of site design and data entry methods on potential customers who are over 50
- The ability to contact the organisation for help if confused
The sites covered by the study were
www.saga.co.uk
www.legalandgeneral.co.uk
www.bankofscotland.co.uk
The results were highly informative, especially with regards to functionality and design. One of the most interesting discoveries was that not all of the potential customers would have successfully accessed a quote from each of the companies involved in the testing. Although the general process of each site was quite simple, small design elements caused big usability issues and in some cases caused potential customers to fail in their goals. This was either through general frustration or simple failure to know what to do next. Fashionable designs and use of technology often caused older potential customers to fail in what should be simple tasks. The Legal and General site was unfortunately let down by some design faults on the home page that would have prevented all but one of the potential customers finding the quote process at all.
The potential customers were asked to perform tasks on the home page illustrated below. It was clear from observing potential customers that the horizontal menu across the top of the screen was not noticed or thought to be navigation initially. After a while, potential customers would try to click on these words expecting pages to load into the main content area. When this did not work, potential customers tried clicking on the white options in the green drop down lists. This action also did not produce a response from the site. Confused potential customers would then try clicking on the individual small white arrows at the end of the words. It was clear by this time that the yellow rollout menu options were hard to see and even more difficult to click on. Whenever the potential customers tried to get the mouse onto a yellow option, it would disappear or the options would change. The reason for this was a lack of accuracy with the mouse, something that over 50s potential customers are consistently poor at. In this case, the design of the site and the technology used conspired to undermine the user and prevented them from achieving their goals.
Figure: Legal and General website navigation.
On the up side, companies appear to be improving the forms on their sites. Although there are still very complex forms on some sites and some aspects of each of the sites tested in this study were very confusing, the overall standard seems to be rising. This is a general observation of form element design from both this testing and previous studies undertaken in the financial services sector by The Usability Company.
The potential customers found the quote procedure on Saga simple to follow because there was generally only one thing to do on each page. This did not make it the most usable or the most liked site, however. The potential customers found the Saga homepage well laid-out and that the "shortcuts" section represented user goals. All potential customers chose this route to start a quote for car insurance.
On the other hand, the main areas of confusion for potential customers on the Bank of Scotland website were the forms and the functionality that fed back to potential customers what had happened in the last stage. It was impossible for the potential customer to tell which of the fields were mandatory. In the testing, it was observed that this caused potential customers to encounter errors.
Good use of space and labelling combined with a simple process flow and easy to follow instructions allow potential customers to easily navigate through complex quote processes. The quote process in the Legal and General site was by far the shortest of all the quote processes and potential customers appreciated that. All the information required for a simple quote is requested in one screen. This means that the amount of fields the user has to fill in is reduced and the amount of time the user has to spend waiting for each page to load is minimized. The action points (buttons to move the user back and forth in the process) were also clearly defined and well labeled.
Those sites that offered their product range in categories that reflect the way that potential customers think about financial services product ranges rather than internal business structures allowed potential customers to find out about their services whereas the others did not.
Finally, All the sites were found to be verbose with regards to copy, instructions and terms and conditions. It would be wise to cut down on copy as it is the general perception that potential customers, when attempting to get an insurance quote, do not wish to sit and read a great deal and this particular group of potential customers often found it difficult to read text on screen. Concise bullet points work better than verbose prose.
Return to newsletter
|
