UMB Online Banking
Customers' anytime, anywhere window to their accounts
Customers' anytime, anywhere window to their accounts
Increased online bankinglog-ins 28% from Oct. 2006 (pre-redesign) to Oct. 2007.
Application landing pages should give you a simple and quick snapshot view to your most commonly used information. In online banking, that's easy — your balances. The temptation is to overthink and start adding to that. We managed to resist. Next, I added easy access to the most commonly used feature, bill pay. You could pay a bill right from the landing page.
The account details screen puts all important numbers and functions at the top of the page, and it includes only information relevant to the type of account you are viewing. For example, for credit cards (below), you need to know not just your balance but also your available credit, minimum payment, and due date. None of this is relevant to, e.g., checking or savings accounts, so you would only see it for a credit-card account. Below the dashboard on top of the page, in the transaction details, people access their transactions for different reasons and in different ways. I expected that the most common purpose for logging in is to check the most recent transactions (e.g. to see if a gas purchase has posted). By default, I had transactions grouped with pending (typically within the last couple of days) up top. For other purposes, you can group and sort transactions any way you need, e.g. to add up how much you spent at the grocery store in the last 30 days.
Error messages and feedback should occur in real time and next to the field you're filling in. You shouldn't have to submit a form to find out you missed something, and you should know right away if you need to change anything. Picking user names is a prime example. You want to know right away if a name is taken, and when there's a problem the message shouldn't pop up and require you to click "OK" or show up on top of the page, away from the actual field.
Bill pay is a fickle beast, because there are two fundamentally different ways people go about it. One group of people prefer to pay bills several at a time, following their pay cycle (e.g., all utility bills with the first paycheck of the month and next month's mortgage with the second). For that, you need a simple interface with a select list of billing accounts (e.g. your electric utility or your car insurance company), a field for amount, a date, and an optional memo. You want to be able to do a few of these at a time and submit them together. You'd have your stack of bills in front of you, go through one by one and set up a payment, then hit Submit. That was the method we launched with, which was reasonably successful.
However, we noticed that a lot of people would simply go to last month's bill payments and copy them one by one to create new ones. Why? Because bills are repetitive. Bills like cable, mortgage, and car insurance are the same each month, while others vary only in amount. It makes sense to go to that vendor ("payee" in banking speak), see what you paid last and when, and quickly set up the next payment. So, a project was launched to organize bill pay by vendor and include, for each vendor, a snapshot view that you could access without leaving the page.
However, we noticed that a lot of people would simply go to last month's bill payments and copy them one by one to create new ones. Why? Because bills are repetitive. Bills like cable, mortgage, and car insurance are the same each month, while others vary only in amount. It makes sense to go to that vendor ("payee" in banking speak), see what you paid last and when, and quickly set up the next payment. So, a project was launched to organize bill pay by vendor and include, for each vendor, a snapshot view that you could access without leaving the page.
(Names and account numbers in these screen shots and mock-ups are fictitious. Since security and privacy are naturally of high concern when you're dealing with online banking, I have displayed here high-definition mock-ups, not screen shots or copies of any sort from the actual application in production.)
