I have noticed over the years how the adoption of Financial Services POS systems have varied so much from company to company. The reasons are many including the business model, the product range being sold, the culture and demographics of the sales force, the functionality of the solution, through to poor usability design.
This later issue of usability design has received relatively little attention from the traditional vendors. Yet with relatively little cost this can yield significant results and with dramatic ROI.
Web design has focused on these areas improving usability through basic techniques such as enhanced navigation and by utilising more adventurous design tools such as Fisheye Menus, Slider Based Filtering and Treemaps to simplify user interfaces. Indeed usability experts will discuss the benefits where complex business processes exist of embedding these techniques and moving from a multipage web site to a single page site which contains all the information needed but where information is hidden when not required. Few processes are more complex than Financial services sales – so why has our market been so slow to adopt these techniques?
There are plenty of usability experts out there and as an industry we should use them more – and don’t restrict usability to web sites – most systems can benefit from improved usability. I would recommend people start to use these companies for two key services expert reviews and for usability testing.
Expert reviews are the quickest and cheapest way to kick start a usability programme and involve a domain expert commenting on the site and addressing the text book type usability issues. Output from such a review can be quick with clear recommendations for usability enhancements that can have a quick impact on usage of any systems. However you are reliant on the quality of a single expert and may miss out on some of the more emotional usability issues. I have worked with bit10 in this area ( www.bit10.com) and would recommend anyone considering work here arrange a meeting with the bit10 team.
Usability testing is when you get a panel of real users to sit and use a system, watched by the experts. This will reveal more of the issues that relate directly and potentially uniquely to that user group ( this could be emotional or cultural issues that experts may not pick up on).
There is of course a degree of overlap between the 2 reviews (indeed Fu and Salvendy believe this to be about 41%), but getting a full picture of the usability of any system is key and therefore I recommend undertaking both anywhere volume usage will deliver a substantial cost benefit and I will re- emphasise this goes beyond websites and includes solutions such as POS systems.
