Accelerating UX Testing in Financial Services

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Challenge

High-quality digital experiences across mobile apps and websites are imperative for companies interested in acquiring and retaining customers. This is especially true in financial services, an industry trying to fend off disruption with $23 billion of venture capital invested in FinTech from 2014-19. Customer acquisition often means a customer is captured for decades. It’s little surprise that Boston Consulting Group’s 2018 report on retail banking implores banks to adopt an advanced digital strategy.

When a national financial services company was conducting a major redesign of their digital properties, they needed a user experience testing solution that would allow them to cycle customer feedback into digital teams at the pace of modern software development. Existing solutions like in-person usability tests and simple prototype tests didn’t work; they were either too expensive, too time-consuming, couldn’t be completed fast enough or didn’t provide high-fidelity feedback.

Solution

In December 2018, Fuel Cycle released FC Live, the only mobile-first video interviewing solution that enables researchers to conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups on any device.

FC Live features integration with Voxpopme for automated transcription, sentiment analysis, text analytics, and rapid delivery of research deliverables 17 to stakeholders in under 24 hours.

FC Live enables screen sharing by interview participants on smartphones and desktops for truly agile moderated usability tests. A moderator can send an interview participant a digital prototype, have them pull it up on their screen, and walk through the prototype. Because FC Live is integrated with Fuel Cycle research communities, profiling data (such as survey responses, CRM data, or similar) is automatically synced to FC Live interviews for analysis. This ensures the researcher is always able to put insights in the context of real-world data, filtering interviews based on behavioral segmentation, product ownership, or demographics.

Outcome

By using FC Live for conducting usability research, the bank’s research team was able to recruit for the interviews, conduct 17 separate interview sessions (including two focus groups), and deliver final results to their product stakeholders in less than two weeks. The team estimated the total cost of conducting these interviews resulted in savings of at least 70% relative to traditional methods and allowed them to execute a complex qualitative project in 1/3 of the time they would have normally expected a similar project to take. In addition to this, the mobile-based solution ensured the research was able to look at a broad audience, rather than just a narrow audience recruited in a major metropolitan area. This inclusive approach delivered results that couldn’t have been discovered during central location testing only. The final product launch is on the way, and the company’s research team gained credibility and internal support for future usability research based on the speed and efficiency with which they were able to deliver results on this high-stakes project.