Month: August 2008

The future of the BofA iPhone app: besides better iPhone support, personalization?

I recently went through the 350 or so reviews of the BofA iPhone app. Here are my conclusions.

First of all, BofA should have called this app “ATM locator” instead of “Mobile Banking”, as the ATM locator capability is praised by most as a way to save on fees when traveling out-of-town or when in unfamiliar neighborhood, but the overwhelming majority comment on the fact that the application provides a very poor mobile banking experience on the iPhone.

What is meant by iPhone-specific experience?

iPhone-specific experience is the single most requested feature. I’m careful not to talk about implementation details here (native app versus iPhone-optimized Web app) as I still don’t have a strong opinion about which approach would ultimately bring the best user experience (native app developed in-house would require a learning curve that would certainly impact the quality of the app, while a Web app would have to be provided with JavaScript API wrappers of some of the SDK APIs like CoreLocation to provide an interesting user experience).

For most what iPhone-specific experience means is:

  • More finger-friendly (avoid pinching, which is a sign that the app is not optimized for the iPhone)
  • iPhone-specific styling like buttons instead of tiny text-based links
  • Consistency across the whole app (not a mix of a native for ATM locator and Web for mobile banking that does not instill confidence)
  • More condensed information per page using table views

Other interesting requested features

Here are the other interesting features requested:

  • Add support for customers in Washington and Idaho states.
  • Faster login (one suggested using a PIN instead of a long password)
  • Transaction reconciliation via mobile banking
  • Background download of information such as balance for quick one-click look
  • Better support for credit card accounts (currenly only balance is available, not transaction list)
  • Support for My Portfolio feature
  • “Something like E-Trade on the BlackBerry”.

Further thoughts: personalizing the mobile banking experience

The one thought that came out of this analysis was that mobile users have fundamentally different needs in terms of the information they want to see after clicking the BofA logo on the iPhone homescreen.While most expect to be able to do everything they can do with online banking, all expect to do much faster the things they do most commonly in online banking. And that’s where the design problem of shrinking online banking into a mobile app is in my opinion. On one hand, what everyone does most commonly is very different from customer to customer. On the other hand, an intuitive interface design principle is “Human interface cognitive load is proportional to the number of clicks/keystrokes/gestures“, which means that people won’t like the user experience unless they get to do what they want to do in the least number of clicks and keystrokes. This includes login in, selecting a transaction, entering amounts, etc.

To give a few examples from the reviews: those who travel don’t care about the ATM locator. Those who travel love it. Some only have a Credit Card account with Bofand don’t care about Checking/Savings.

Which leads me to think that the future of the BofA iPhone app or any mobile banking app for that matter will be in the ability for the user to personalize their experience by providing to BofA the shortcuts to the transactions they do most.

This may include just a transaction identifier and an account identifier (ex. “view balance” “checking-1234″) or more complex shortcuts that borders on programming/querying: for instance “view transactions” “CC-8456″ “Last 10 posted transaction” or “transfer” “$100″ “to John”.

Online banking will most likely be the place where these personalizations will be programmed. Until then, getting that 5 star rating on iTunes app store and getting everyone happy might be difficult.

Banking-related panel proposals for 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival

I searched the SXSW interactive panel picker for “banking”, “money”, “finance”, “financial”, etc. Here are the panels I found:

  • Banking 2.0 – Algorithmically Fixing the Sub-Prime Mess (suggested by Christopher Hughes, PennyMac): Sub-prime debt may be causing the collapse of the worldwide economy. Speculators, investors, banks, mortgage brokers, honest home-owners have all been duped into believing that that the real estate market was a “sure thing”. Can a solution be found with a computing cluster, open source software, and a semi-complex algorithm? Yes.
  • Future of Money: Life after the Fed (suggested by Blake Stephenson, Flow): Ron Paul’s presidential campaign shone a light on the impossibility of central banks to “regulate” the economy and the inherent problems with fiat money (paper money). The internet is playing and will continue to play a critical role in the creation of the future of money. What is the future of money?
  • Mobile Ubiquitous Banking and the Future of Money (suggested by Kyle Outlaw, Avenue A | Razorfish): Nearly half the world’s population now has a mobile device and more than a thousand cell phones are being activated every minute. The ubiquity of mobile devices will make new services available to billions of people worldwide who have not had access to traditional banks or credit cards. In developing countries such as Kenya – where nearly 80% of the population is excluded from the formal financial sector – text messaging is being used to transfer money to friends and family living in other countries. Moreover, new forms of currency are being created – trading cell phone minutes for goods and services, for example. This panel will explore the challenges and opportunities as banks go mobile, and how the revolution in mobile financial services will change the way we think about money.
  • Strategies for Establishing Social Media in B2B Relationships (Brad Garland, The Garland Group | Banktastic.com) Social media in the consumer space is clearly talked about and prevalent. What is barely getting addressed is how these technologies can be implement in the business world and what are ways to do it successfully. This panel will explore that concept and how B2B relationships can be formed using these tools.

About SXSW:

SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

iPhone Barcode reader now integrated with Safari/Dialer/Mail

Stefan Hafeneger has released the latest version of the Barcode application, and it is now available at the App Store.

The decoding now supports both DataMatrix and  QR code format, but more importantly it supports the extraction of the data for use with Safari (encoded data has to be a URL), Mail (encoded data has to be an email address) and Dialer (encoded data has to be a phone number). Here is a free online DataMatrix barcode generator to try for yourself.

The decoding actually does not seem to work as well as it did in the earlier version, but think of the possibilities opened by the ability to send to a barcode, open a barcode in Safari or dial a barcode…