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Chinese Banks Homepage Usability Research Report - 11 July 2006
by Ming Zhao
Read this article in Chinese (translated by Rong Qin, proofread by Ying He, Christina Li)
Courtesy of Apogee HK.
1. Executive Summary
The homepages of three leading Chinese retail banks are assessed for their usability.
These pages provide a wealth of information but found to have the following issues:
- Excessive flashing advertisements, scrolling texts and moving graphics
- Weak navigation support and in-site search functionality
- Inconsistent branch homepages derived from inconsistent branch operations
- Poor interactive application generating negative user experiences, and
- Lack of content to assist potential customers to start a business.
However one bank does have an effective forum to provide online customer support.
The study recommends the following actions for the Chinese banks to improve their homepages:
- Reduce flashing and moving graphics
- Enhance search and navigation functions
- Improve interactive applications
- Establish web design guidelines
- Increase business banking content, and
- Standardise branch operations.
2. Introduction
Homepages are critical for a business to provide information and services to its current and potential customers, partners, suppliers, and the general public. Their effectiveness has an impact on business success including increased sales, better customer support, and reduced operation costs.
Methodology
This study assesses the usability of homepages of 3 leading Chinese retail banks from a user’s perspective. The selection is mainly based on their popularity in the Chinese banking market:
- Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC, http://www.icbc.com.cn),
- China Construction Bank(CCB, http://www.ccb.cn), and
- Agricultural Bank of China (ABChina, http://www.abchina.com).
For comparison, three western banks are selected, one each from Australia, the UK, and USA. They are leading retail banks in their respective countries:
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia (Australia, http://commbank.com.au),
- HSBC Group(UK, http://www.hsbc.co.uk), and
- Citigroup(USA, http://www.citigroup.com).
The assessment refers to usability guidelines and considers both generic usability issues as well as issues specific to the homepage of a bank. However, the study does not consider the specific needs of the bank’s partners and suppliers, nor real-time online banking services for a customer.
3. Key Findings
All three Chinese bank homepages provide a wealth of information and in general good content structure and page design. Page layout and colour scheme designs are satisfactory. All homepages provide simple and clear site maps.
However there are usability issues measured against usability criteria as well as compared with their western counterparts.
3.1. Excessive Use of Graphics and Flash
Chinese homepages, not only those from the banks, tend to use graphics, flashing, or scrolling text excessively. This is nuisance imposed on the user rather than a cultural difference. The CCB and ABChina homepages show reasonably good constraint in using graphics, although still excessive compared to their Western counterparts. The worst use of graphics and flashing is the ICBC homepage.
The most disruptive is a moving graphical frame that follows the user to every corner of the screen, blocking the content that the user is actually interested in.
3.2. Weak Navigation and In-Site Search Functions
The importance of navigation to a web user is similar to the floor layout of a shopping centre to a shopper. At any time, the user should be able to know where they are, how to move to another page, and return to the home without any difficulty.
Not all Chinese bank homepages provide the ease of navigation. For example, CCB provides a dropdown list on the homepage to enter a function group (Figure 1- left, which if part of the top level menu for Private Services).
However, following the menu structure, Saving Services -> Product Introduction, to a third level page, there is no visibility of other function groups, nor location of the current page in the menu structure (Figure 1 – right). To visit another function group, the user has to return to the top, and then choose from the dropdown list.
Figure 1. Page navigation: top-level menu (left) and a third level page (right), CCB
The three Chinese bank homepages provide only basic keyword based search within the site. If it happens that the search keyword is a generic word, the user has to read through pages of hits. To add another keyword can only make it worse as only the “or” relationship is provided, which brings out even more hits.
Figure 2 shows search results by keywords “deposit interest” (存款利率) from the three Chinese banks. In contrast, Citigroup and HSBC provide an advanced search function, while Commbank provides only the basic search.
Figure 2. Search results by “deposit interest” (存款利率): ICBC (top-left), CCB (top-right), ABChina (bottom-left), and Search Tips from HSBC (bottom-right)
3.3. Effective Online Customer Support
ICBC provides an online forum for customer services. The forum is very active with close to 100,000 members, and daily answers to over 1000 questions. Many questions are answered within minutes by the support staff. In addition to answering ad hoc questions, the forum also provides online consulting services at specified times. Given the questions answered and the speed of answering, the ICBC forum is successful in building customer relationships.
There are two factors behind this successful application: 1) there is a big user group who are used to online forums, and 2) the labour cost is relatively low to staff the support team. Therefore this is a China specific approach, which is difficult to implement by a Western bank.
Figure 3 is a screen shot of the online forum. The photos of three experts are present to promote an online consultation session scheduled in two days.
Figure 3. ICBC Online Forum
3.4. Inconsistent Branch Web Pages
The website of a Western bank has little branch specific information apart from their contact data such as addresses and phone numbers. In contrast, a Chinese bank has massive pages for branch offices.
When visiting a branch’s homepage, it is very confusing for a user if a page is branch specific, or a copy of, or link to, a page from the head office.
Even under the same page structure, different branches can have very different content (Figure 4).
This inconsistency is not simply a web design or usability issue, it is a reflection of the differences in branch business operations.
Figure 4. Pages on “Dragon Card” in Beijing (left) and Anhui (right) Branches, CCB
This inconsistency causes difficulty in customer services. For example, all Chinese banks have difficulty in providing Q&A pages to answer customer questions because of the variation in branch operations. A web master of the ICBC online forum could not answer a question as simple as how to receive a bank draft. He could only advise the customer to check with a branch office.
3.5. Poor Interactive Applications
Interactive applications, if used properly, will improve the user experience. For example, an interactive map can provide information such as bus routes to a branch.
Amongst the three Chinese banks and the comparative Western banks, only ABChina provides an interactive map in its Shanghai Branch. However this map does not work even for a simple query as provided by the map (eg. search all ATM locations within 500 metres of the MingZhu Park). The map seems to be only able to search from the centre of the map. There is no way to shift the search centre to the edge of the map, where the MingZhu Park is located.
Another example of poor interactive applications, also from the Shanghai Branch, is its demo function. For example for bank transfer, after filling in the transfer amount and a password (other data is provided on the page), clicking the “Confirm” button results in a “page cannot be found” error.
Both applications intend to generate business value. However with their current usability, they only create negative user experience and damage the business.
3.6. Lack of Content for Starting a Business
All retail banks provide both personal and business services. A distinctive difference between Chinese banks and their Western counterparts is in business services. A Chinese bank looks more like a “passive money manager”. There is no content to show its support in the early stage of business development. In contrast, a Western bank plays a very active role in assisting business establishment, starting from choosing a business structure and developing a business plan.
Figure 5 shows business services provided by CCB (left) and Commbank (right). CCB simply has no information about starting a business.
Figure 5. Business services provided by CCB (left) and Commbank (right)
4. Recommendations
Based on this usability study, the following recommendations for improvement are made under a constraint that no specific needs of a particular user group are considered.
4.1. Reduce Flashing and Moving Graphics
While Chinese users may tolerate flashing advertisements and moving graphics for the time being, similar to the situation where the users are charged for receiving a mobile phone call, they are certainly not happy to see them everywhere. The web design should show more constraint to reduce flashing and moving graphics.
4.2. Enhance Search and Navigation Functions
It is recommended that all bank homepages introduce an advanced search function to provide users with a better capability to search the content within the site. Technology is mature now that even a Boolean search is not regarded as “advanced”. It is also recommended to review the content organisation, in particular redesign location guidance on all pages, to improve navigation.
4.3. Improve Interactive Applications
It is part of the Chinese culture to trial new technologies vigorously. However, the usability level of the ABChina Shanghai Branch homepage is simply not acceptable. When a new technology is introduced, effort is required to make sure it works at least on basic functionality.
4.4. Establish Web Design Guidelines
It is imperative to introduce guidelines for web page designs [5-6] so that consistency can be promoted across the Chinese bank web sites for key sections, navigation and content development.
4.5. Increase Business Banking Content
In general the Chinese banks show less maturity in providing business banking services compared with their Western counterparts. This is an area in which the Chinese banks can improve significantly to attract new business and to establish partnership with entrepreneurs from the inception of a new business concept.
4.6. Standardise Branch Operations
Non-standard branch operations make it difficult for the corporate to behave like one organisation and add costs to the business. It is an urgent need for Chinese banks to reform themselves to perform on par with international companies when they face more intensive international competition.
5. References
Daniel Szuc and Whitney Quesenbery, Choosing the Right Channel for Communicating with Customers, October 2005
Daniel Szuc and Gerry Gaffney, Back to Basics, 4 December 2004
Jakob Nielsen, Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability ,
12 May 2002
Jakob Nielsen, Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability, 12 May 2002
Jakob Nielsen, The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines, 10 November 2003
NSW Department of Commerce, Web Usability and Accessibility Guide , August 2002
Usability.gov – United States Department of Health and Human Services, http://www.usability.gov/guides/index.html Ron Rogowski, etc.
Ron Rogowski, etc. “What Do Consumers Expect From Corporate Home Pages?”, Forrester Report, 3 March 2006
6. Credits
Thank you John Rhodes from Webword
About Apogee
Apogee Usability Asia Ltd (“Apogee”), based in Hong Kong, China – is Asia’s leading Usability Research & consulting services provider. Apogee assists companies like Yahoo China, FedEx, eBay, Cathay Pacific, HSBC, PCCW and others with User Research. Apogee also offers Usability training at www.usabilitythatworks.com
Ming Zhao has worked for the last 5 years on usability studies, web content rationalisation, online business support, and work group collaboration. He received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
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