Industry: Online Finance
Featured Methods: Research Program Design, Online Surveys, Web Analytics
A leading provider of financial information wanted to benchmark the online user experience of general and professional financial users so that comparisons could be made across time. The company was in the process of developing a revised website, and wanted to use these findings to better meet users’ needs and drive additional usage of the site. We were asked to establish, conduct, and analyze a benchmark usability assessment of this finance site to achieve these objectives.
Given the mass-market nature of the company’s audience, we knew that there would be many different users with widely differing needs and goals, so using a large-sample methodology was the best approach. We recommended recruiting 400 target users of financial websites, including a mix of general and professional financial users as well as a mix of both users and non-users of the site. We used online technology to capture qualitative, quantitative, and behavioral data as users performed 5 key tasks on the site. We created the tasks to establish clear user experience benchmarks, to learn how users responded to and interacted with the site, to understand how the site met their needs, and to prioritize future improvements.
We found that users valued the quality and quantity of the information available from the financial information site, but there was an opportunity to improve the presentation and accessibility of the information. We recommended new ways to better utilize the site’s data to provide more immediate financial insights, and how to make the site’s information more discoverable to new users. Users also had challenges with stock quote and symbol lookups, and our recommendations for improvement were based on the users’ own expectations to increase comprehension. We provided the client not only with these tactical recommendations, but also with a standardized research methodology that would ensure that ongoing improvements were measurable against their core business goals.
