Brick and Mortar vs. Online Only Banking Desktop Homepages: UX Study

UX Researcher

The Problem: With the advent of online only banking firms like Discover and SoFi, we noticed that there was a distinct contrast in the layout and navigation on the account homepages from traditional Brick and Mortar firms like Citi and Chase.

The Goal: We wanted to uncover whether users had a preference for any specific banking experience.

Time Frame: January 2023 - March 2023

Research Goals

Learn about how users navigate their banking homepages.
Understand what information users look for when logging into their banks.
Gauge user awareness and sentiment of promotions and offers.

Research Methodologies

Usability Testing: To compare and contrast the banking experience between different firms (2 traditional brick and mortar firms; Citi and Chase. 2 online only firms; Discover and SoFi) .

Usability Testing

Recruitment

Participants should be in the age ranges for Gen X and Millennials with an equal number of each.
Participants must have at least one bank and account and one credit card from the same financial insituion.
Participants should include varying ethnic, economic backgrounds, and geographical locations.

Approach

Eight participants were recruited between the ages of 58 - 29.

Interviews were 1 hour long and conducted via zoom over the course of 2 days in February 2023.

Participants were questions about their banking habits prior to interacting with any of the homepages in order to learn about what kind of information was important to them.

Banking homepage order was rotated in order to avoid any bias.

Key Takeaways

Participants liked that Citi places transactions above the fold on the homepage

The location of recent transactions is important for homepages. Many participants said that they often logged in to view specific transactions, such as recent purchases or bills.

Both Citi and Chase placed some of the user’s recent transactions on the homepage, which allowed them to quickly find that information without having to click into specific accounts. Some participants showed a preference for Citi because they placed the transactions above the fold, while Chase placed it at the bottom of the page. Discover did not show transactions on the homepage, while SoFi hid them below the promotions section.

Citi and Chase also both allowed participants to navigate through their multiple accounts as a single page experience, which was preferred. Citi did this with a left side navigation that let users click through their account information, which populates on the right side. While Chase did this by opening a drawer that users could easily close out to return to their homepages. When participants were navigated to additional pages on sites like Discover and SoFi, they would sometimes use the browser back navigation to get back and look at other accounts. One participants specifically mentioned that this was problematic out of concern that they could potentially be logged out.

Chase expandable account drawer

SoFi Homepage

While some participants were vehemently against any type of promotion on their homepages and dashboards, most saw benefits in seeing them. Most participants who have multiple accounts with a single firm spoke about having favorable banking experiences and were not averse to grow the relationship. Some even spoke about the convenience of having a “one stop shop” for their banking needs.

However promotions like the one on SoFi's Dashboard were universally disliked. Participants found the use of high fidelity stock images to highlight promotions and offers as a distraction that drew their attention away from their account information. SoFi added an additional point of confusion by placing promotional tiles in the same section as a user’s current accounts.

On account dashboards, users are looking for layouts and features that improve their ability to scan for specific transactions. Both Citi and SoFi had features that users appreciated for improving scannability. One feature, seen on SoFi, that users spoke highly of was that they parsed out each transaction by month before breaking them down by date. But by far the most advantageous feature was seen on Citi, which had separate columns for account credits and debits. The two columns allowed participants to easily scan for specific transactions. While other firms color-coded credits and debits, participants found the two columns easier to scan.

Debit and credit columns on Citi Transactions

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