Palm Banking: Evaluation Report

Introduction

This third report describes the evaluation of the redesigned Palm Banking client (design report), which sports a greatly improved user interface and interaction style. During the initial analysis (see analysis report) and iterative redesign real users were not heavily involved in the development process.

To increase the effectiveness of the evaluation a combination of two methods is proposed. First, usage simulations with HCI experts reviewing the documentation and second, low-fidelity (lo-fi) usability testing with potential customers will be conducted, to obtain as efficient feedback as possible in the short time frame and with the available resources. The field experiments based on standard tests followed by a brief interview are used to verify the experts' suggestions. Part of the usability tests should be done in a professional laboratory with video equipment.

I was really curious to prove the usability of my redesign including new ideas on how to offer financial services for customers on the move. Some design aspects such as the navigation with pop-up menus I judged skeptical and the time to involve prospective users was overdue. The evaluation of the mobile companion for the UBS e-banking (Telebanking) application – to instantly manage your finances and investments, anytime, anywhere – may begin.

Conclusion

Evaluating the system was the most exciting and challenging task during the whole development of the Palm Banking application. The preparation and data analysis of the evaluation was very time consuming. The next step is the implementation of a software prototype to prove the feasibility of the entire banking service. Additional usability tests a in professional laboratory will ensure that further improvements based on the recommendations and adaptions for today's Telebanking capabilities do not hurt the achieved ease of use. Palm Banking has to be fun and exceed customers' expectations.

The evaluation revealed no risky show stopper and the suggested refinements are easy to fix. To be successful in user interface design, the designer must not only understand the user, but also know the work activies, environment and technology. The Telebanking know-how including analyzing user feedback and usability testing, as well as the intense study of the Palm OS programs proved invaluable to produce an impressive design within the given restrictions. The goal to focus on visibility and affordance, the key principles of human-computer interaction, resulted in an excellent user interface. Future Telebanking products will be measured against this high usability standard.

Designing user interfaces for handheld computers is an emerging market and mobile computing – supported by wireless communication and maybe speech recognition – will become ubiquitous in the future.

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Download the PDF document of the complete evaluation report for Palm Banking. See the table of contents for more details.

Palm Banking: Evaluation Report (28 pages, 308 kB)

Table of Contents