Six Quick Tips to Improve the User Experience for Mobile Banking
My name is Abbey Smalley, and I’m a Lead User Experience and Visual Designer for Perficient’s XD team. I have had the opportunity to work with financial institutions on various projects. In my work, I find similar user experience needs often rise to the top.
Whether you’ve decided it’s time to create a mobile experience or are looking to improve the one you already have for mobile banking, remember these six quick tips to help ensure you are delivering the most useful experience for your users.
1) Desktop Computer Transactions Should Also be Accessible on the Mobile Platform: While it’s true that some of your users might be looking to view information on their accounts, it’s also important to focus on the fact that your users are most likely accessing the app on their mobile device to perform a task “on the go”. Consider the top 5 tasks a user might have when they make contact with you over the phone, on their computer, or in person at a brick and mortar location. For example, a user going to their bank may want to deposit and transfer funds. The value of your mobile experience comes from allowing your user access to information and task completion “anywhere, anytime” when they aren’t in the convenience of their own home or near their local branch. Note, that even though your user expects to be able to perform tasks on their phone as they would on their computer, the experience and flow of the tasks could (and most likely should) alter to accommodate the smaller screen and the phone’s native functionality whenever possible.
2) Speed of Use: The operating speed and load times are crucial for keeping your users attention. If load time exceeds a few seconds between transitions, users will consider the app or mobile website to not be “user friendly” and it will no longer be viewed as a convenient, timesaving tool. When building out your bank’s mobile experience, remember to test it with real user data so you can see what operating speeds will really be like with more robust/complex data being loaded in. Testing speed with lighter/dummy data does not always produce realistic results.