An interesting article in today's SMH: Australian banks 'fail' in online mission. Finally, someone is getting it. If your website is difficult to use it doesn't matter how much you try to push people to work online, they will avoid it whenever possible.
The analysis of four large Australian banks focussed on finding information rather than the online banking applications.
To test out the sites, reviewers acted on advice from each of the banks that researching home loans and credit card deals were the top two reasons for visits to public areas on their websites. However when they set about the task of finding out about these products on each of the sites, they encountered some serious obstacles.
It seems that the basic task of information delivery was where the banks failed.
The study, conducted by US research group Forrester, found that illegible text, poor layouts and missing information were just some of the major design flaws that forced customers to turn to more expensive call centres and branches, or even to seek out alternative offerings from competitors."Each of the major banks could save more than $7 million a year by making their sites easier to use," the researcher said.
Now, that's money that talks.
Comments
Can someone please tell Centrelink and the Family Assistance Office this?
Posted by: Zoe | July 25, 2006 04:18 PM
Somehow I don't know if the 'money talks' bit will have as much influence on them. I agree with your sentiment about those sites though.
Posted by: Georg | July 25, 2006 04:31 PM
Any .gov.au site. My wibble about the tax return software (it took a while to find the software in the first place) was only made possible because I can think laterally and use tabs to great effect.
Stupid thing is that doing it right *will* save the Feds money — if people can do things online then publication and staffing costs can be reduced which means the government has more money to buy Howard tracksuits.
Posted by: Black Knight | July 25, 2006 05:41 PM
Of course it will save them money. The problem is that they don't want to SPEND money to SAVE money. They only see the reduction in demands on staff time (taking calls, answering questions etc) but they don't want to actually pay money to develop decent websites. You can't have it both ways.
Posted by: Georg | July 27, 2006 10:31 AM
Interesting to note that ANZ are about to relaunch their banking site...
Posted by: Andrew | August 24, 2006 11:09 AM