Usability of Online Internet Banking Applications of Slovak Banks - Pizza SEO Study

Usability of internet banking applications matters – for some bank clients it is in fact one of the decisive factors in choosing a bank.

These days banks try to minimize client visits at branches through their pricing policies set in favour of using online services. For active clients internet banking is one of the key channels for carrying out banking transactions. Its usability and the overall quality of user experience is therefore very important.

According to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, 15% of the Slovak population used Internet banking in 2007 – a higher share than in the neighbouring countries. These clients are lucrative for the banks, since Internet is accessed disproportionately not only by the young but also by people with higher socio-economic status
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In early 2007 Pizza SEO began working on a large rating of Internet banking applications of Slovak banks. Our methodology is based on the so-called user personas technique – we created three fictitious but representative users who attempted to complete specific tasks in the various Internet banking systems.

As a result we defined 60 indicators used to test applications of Slovak banks. The list of indicators along with our resulting rankings of usability of Slovak Internet banking applications will be published at the end of this exercise.

Our check-list focused on two aspects of usability: efficiency and errors since these were the easiest to measure objectively. We evaluated to what extent the functions we identified as necessary can be easily accessed by a regular user and whether the application can withstand user errors (ability to enter data in varying formats, etc.). For selected tasks we tracked the so-called click distance (number of muse clicks required to complete task). We based our methodology on several international research reports on the importance of individual functions a features of Internet banking applications.

Pizza SEO if financing this test – we had to refuse the option to be supported by banks themselves to avoid a conflict of interest. This is one of the reasons why the ranking has been so long in the making.
However, while testing each application our consultants have come across a variety of interesting aspects, pleasant and unpleasant surprises. We are therefore publishing a brief videocast (in Slovak) on each of the banks. Some of our findings may be of interest to developers of online banking applications but many are relevant to other types of applications and will therefore be of interest to a broader audience.

We released the first videocast on Komercni Banka on 7th May 2008 on our Slovak blog, several others have followed and we will release them with approximately on a weekly basis. The ranking table of all banks will come at the end and will be provided in Slovak and English. We look forward to your comments and experiences with Internet banking in Slovakia and in general.

Tags: internet banking, online banking, Slovakia, usability

Written by Andrej (May 27th, 2008)