Bank statements. We love to look at them, export them, ponder them and see what our money is doing or what ...ASB Bank in New Zealand recently redid their look and feel of their Internet Banking offering "Fastnet".
It looks great, nice and clean (see illustration), but in the clean up they swept out one simple drop list out of the statement generator.
In one 'sweep', it changes how people look for statements in a particular range.. now its a chore, a mild one granted.
Previously, selecting statements of a particular range could be done with date pickers or via a drop down list of ranges (e.g. 3, 6 months back). It was quick and easy and took seconds to get an export. It corresponded to natural language. (e.g. "I want my statements for the last 3 months")
Now, people have to use calender pickers or type the range in (see the illustration above) only. It sounds trivial ("there goes the usability guy again") but why is it grinding my gears?
Right now, think about how you talk - "I want three months of statements or perhaps you are more exacting "I want statements from November 09 to August 09", but lets assume day to day you just want to look at past statements.
Using the calender picker only means: I have to think about this and fiddle more with my mouse or keyboard. Lets face it, people are lazy, impatient and want things fast. Here, they're made to type and think more about a date ranges.
Take 1 - the old way
Goal -I want my last six months of statements
Method
- I click on the drop down, select "last 6 months", export to CSV..
Take 2 - the new way
Same goal - I want my statements 6 months back.
Method + stream of consciousness
- (Starts counting on fingers) "So that's today
- and I want them back to the 3rd of......... er Nov, Oct, (whats before August) er September, (pauses whilst counting six months of the year backwards ..try it yourself. )
- I'm clicking the month picker 6 times..("bo -ring! I just want my statement" - picturing a teen with no attention span or an older user)
- "Number of transactions per page ?" *pause* "my export is going to have pages? Do I choose a value? Leave it ? er I'll ignore it and hope for the best"..
- Export and done...
Iteration 1
A 'Range' picker makes it faster for me to generate a statement using natural language for selections.
Fastnet has rules for the data you can have when either Exporting or Viewing data. The instructions telling you this are lower down the screen. However its not an area people look at often if their focus is on this form/control.
Why make me work the rules out? Or ping me with an error if I get it wrong?
Iteration 2 - again quickly
- Let's have instructions relevant to the selection type, when & where I need them (e.g. at the point they are relevant and where I'm looking). Have the relevant text appear for 'View' or 'Export' selections.
- Constrain the date ranges and drop downs to the data available depending on the amount we're allowed in each circumstance.
- Since 'Transactions per page' is only relevant to a 'view' and export format relevant to export, have them appear depending on the selection above too..
Is it me or am I chronologically challenged
That date picker also got me, I thought "from" meant "now" the current day to the date range back (to)..
This could also be just me - I think historically in terms of statements. 'From'' is today and 'to' is how far back I want my statements. I think from the present (from) to the future (to) when thinking about booking tickets, flights etc). User research (see my health check post) can find out how people view your world.
Wrapping up..
This might be trivial, nit picky, but it does make a potential difference to usage and speed.
If you are designing or refreshing the look and feel, get an external/or internal resource to conduct a usability review of your site to catch gotchas or "if it ain't broke, don't fix its".
Steve Krug where art thou? Luke W?
Goldstein?
4 comments:
I disagree with you. Its 2009 mate, keep up with Change. If you have a website things will change, especially if your user database is in the hundreds of thousands. ASB has always been giving their customers to try new things faster than any bank, let alone changing things based on customer feedback quickly and easily. If you look at the bigger picture and actually look at what they done, its migrated to .NET 3.5 which or at least some of their pages have which means they are keeping up with change and technology, I suggest you do too :)
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate you taking time to consider this post.
As I conducted usability testing for an NZ bank site last year, a participant from the target market said to me "Why can't designers make something for me and not themselves".
I, my 70+ year old folks, the electrician, the harried parent will be grateful and thank progress that we're now on .NET 3.5. as we fiddle around to get a bank statement.
Change is great if it makes things easier.. Perhaps we could go really advanced and run queries for statements in SQL? Select * from "account_table" where date=...
"If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet."
Charles M. Allen
"Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?"
Stanislaw J. Lec
Usability testing can only be conducted so much to a point and you can not always capture every type of user in small usability testing groups. I know this cause Ive worked in usability testing groups and it always comes down to deadlines and budgets, and from that you can only ASSUME your usability testing covers all your types of users...even if it means your user database is in the 100,000s...The best way is to get things out there, and build with the customers as community in this every fast, growing, changing industry. Cheers Rohan.
true enough thats why testing with your key target users covers a large portion of your users.
and I agree with getting it out there and using crowdsourcing and labs (a la Google) also to socialise and try ideas. Some is better than none. Any better than some.. Thanks for the comment!
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