Responsive Bank Websites

Video Transcript

So I'll talk a little about responsive design. So I've been with Bank of the West for about 9 months now, prior to that I was with Bank of America for just shy of 11 years. A good chunk of that time was spent in the user experience space and prior to that in eServices focused on user experience as well, so I'm going to talk a little about some of the things we're wrestling with at Bank of the West and some of the things we've wrestled with at Bank of America, so I don't know that I have all the answers for responsive design by any stretch and there are people in the room much smarter than I and how deliver responsive at the architectural level so you want to hit those people up. I want to talk about it in the context of what we're trying to do in creating experiences at Bank of the West and I know some of the things we wrestled with were very similar to Bank of America. So what are we trying to do? This is kind of an overly simplified view of things but we're trying to get all the content and capabilities of this the websites that we have and we're trying to get them into these, right, so we're trying to figure out how to take what we've invested in over time and spent a decade plus building up and put it into these and not to take away from the comments that Ned shared in his open remarks where I fully agree with the idea of optimizing content and optimizing experiences across the mobile devices, so this an overly simplified view and way to think of these things but I don't know anybody else saddled with thousands of pages built on a legacy platform that doesn't adapt particularly well to mobile devices, anyone?

Yeah, right so that's what we're all struggling with and it's pretty painful, it is a challenge, so responsive is all about trying to answer that question, how do you figure out what to do with these sites that we have and how do you make it work in the context of today's mobile enabled world? So just some definitions because responsive gets thrown around a lot by agency partners and otherwise but we think of it as responsive just a system or experience that responds based on the device type, so PC, tablet, mini, smartphone, fablet didn't include it up there, but I guarantee next year's hot booth is going to be the one with the best man purse.

So methods of delivery for mobile a couple of different ways to do it for mobile so one is custom experience by device type, we just call it custom, and the second is the common code base that it adapts the experience based on the device and that's really responsive, so when people are talking about responsive that's really what they mean is that that actual code level response mechanism and building it that way in difference to ________ [00:02:40]. I know that they have suggested a third option in their solution stack, I don't know that option or solution but I wanted to give reference to that but I haven't spent enough time with them to understand that but this conference is all about connecting people so may be worth the conversation.

So the number 2 in terms of responsive is really obviously you can do number 1 and that's just an expensive way to deliver all your content, so it's about how do you do number 2. Why does it matter? If you didn't get the memo yesterday if you are asleep through all the presentation mobile is taking up, so it continues to obviously device proliferation despite what the CEO of Blackberry says I think tablets might be around for awhile, a bit longer than five years. iPad growth is 3x that of iPhone, Androids are exploding so we all know this stuff. This is a slide interestingly that comScore has on their track loop and we've pulled it in to this deck because really the essence of this is thinking about this in the context of people are using multiple devices to access your sites, so we think about the world in a multi-device framework, obviously it's multichannel and digital has an extension into branch and other channels and that's a different topic but in terms of the actual digital devices they access your sites in the morning commute, on the phone, during the workday on the PC and then in the evening on the tablet. So you really have to think about the experiences cutting across all of those devices and that's kind of the tricky part of doing this in today's environment and that's why we're all sort of wrestling with this because we know this but we have these legacy sites that aren't particularly well suited to adapt to these things.

So who is doing what? I live in San Francisco so I'm not in a hub airline city okay, but I travel a fair amount, so over the last 3 years so I don't have one carrier that I use all the time. I fly a bunch of different carriers depending on where the heck I'm going. So I've watched over the last you know call it 3 years, I've watched the airline industry in their evolution unresponsive, and it's been a really interesting study. There are some interesting parallels to banking and airline industry in the context of we all have high cost call centers that we want to take calls out of right and we have content that will answer most of the questions for our customers if we can get that content to them and keep them from calling us, right. That doesn't go into the sales side of it but–so Delta over here has now they have custom mDot homepage, when you talk about responsive you can also talk about your mDot strategy, so we don't have a mDot yet at the Bank of the West but that's what we're trying to get to. So Delta's mDot homepage is they've customized experiences around the key activity so kind of okay makes sense, right so my, they assume that you're checking it on a mobile device, well you're probably traveling or going to be traveling very soon so what matters? I need to check my flight status, maybe I can book a flight directly off of here, maybe I can check-in, maybe I can get flight scheduled, but if you look at the bottom what's after that? I got to go to the full HTML site, right, so start of the journey if you will down this path and have only delivered on sort of some key experiences, they haven't delivered on the full site.

US Airways, little bit further along in the journey, again custom homepage on the mDot US Airways site where they've tailored the experiences, key activities but all that ancillary content down below flight schedules, baggage, airport information in the air, so all of that where do you think that goes? That's all that customer service type content that they've got on the legacy website that they've started to adapt to mobile and they've build out in a responsive architectural. So what happens when you try to get baggage information, just check baggage fees as the use case here. Delta I have to go to full HTML website, pinch and zoom, navigate down pinch and zoom try to read the content. Pretty painful right, pretty common task and experience, so if you look at US Airways content optimized site, so they've focused on cascading down from what are the key activities, what I truly want to optimize around and then what do I want to and what content are people accessing frequently that I need to start to enable. Because you're not going to flip 2000, 3000, or 10000 pages of BofA, you're not going to flip that overnight into a responsive architecture so it's a matter of figuring out how you want to go about doing that and cascading your way through your site and your content.

If you need an example, if you need other examples within the organization all the media, all the top media sites I should say not all the local level media sites, but all the top level sites have built responsive design systems through and through so Huffington Post being sort of the most distributed in their editorial and writing staff, this is the PC based homepage not a huge fan, its ridiculously long scrolling page, but key headline story, top navigation of key categories of news and information then the lower the page goes you have got, you know it's organized by top bloggers, its organized by most popular, all right, so a lot of content curated in there. You go to the handset experience and top story obviously they've curtailed the top menu to be the key categories but you can go to more and get into more, there you have got the top news stories smaller thumbnail image, smaller headline, most popular again the similar content categories are organized in a very similar framework. So as a user I'm not relearning that experience, I have familiarity with that experience whether I'm accessing it on my PC or on the handset or on a tablet, so I mean if you need examples in your organization to kind of why it's important and where it's headed I mean we're all thinking about where it's headed, this is where it's headed, it's all headed to responsive, it's all headed in the direction of delivering all of your content across all of the devices and the media sites are in a 24-7 publishing framework so they have to have this, right. They have to have the ability to deliver that content out to the marketplace endlessly that's their bread and butter, right, it's getting you to consume that content and consume the ads.

So which approach to follow? Some general guidelines when to consider responsive, all the basic content of your site, all the simple experiences not the overly complex ones, lower traffic pages. When to consider custom? They're still in need of custom and it's really a hybrid and I think yesterday there was talk about apps and what's going to happen with apps and if you look at app media consumption far exceeds mobile web consumption that's absolutely true and I wouldn't expect to see that change, however, I don't know anyone who wants to manage their you know in this case baggage fee content or fees, fee schedule within their app, within a coded compiled piece of software, why would you want to do that, right?

So everyone–so the app strategy, yeah there is still a need for native apps but ultimately I think we're going to end up in a hybrid architecture for our apps nonetheless because we need to deliver all of its content. If I could get my customer service content enabled in my mobile app or in a hybrid app tomorrow I would absolutely do that, I don't have any of that, how many people have kind of call it most of their customer service content in their mobile app? Does anyone have that out yet? I mean it's not there yet, right. You know you think about what people do, what do your customers do when they visit your website? Ours log in right, so where do I need that content? I need it behind the authenticated wall. What do they do when they come to mobile? They log in. Yeah maybe they are checking balances, transfer funds or pay a bill, what have you, but they're also trying to answer a question. So the same behaviors that we've seen over time and the reason that we have these huge websites and we have all this content is because we want to answer the customers question, make it available to them. We don't have that in mobile today so we're trying to get there.

And that's why I think all that basic content is a place to start and I think US Airways is a good example of a company that has taken a look at the behavior, taken a look at top call types and started to enable that content through a very nicely organized set of menus that didn't exist before. Sort of guiding principles, you really have to define your guiding principles for experience design and your objectives for mobile. Are you a smartphone first, is it going to be smartphone centric, are you tablet centric, PC centric, hybrid? We are tablet centric I can say, as we're overhauling experiences we are tablet centric. We are focused on that as the centerpiece of the design with the idea being obviously tablet, if it works on a tablet it will scale up nicely to a PC. I have to wrestle with how to deal with the handset in full candor, and then it's got scale and degree to a degree as you work your way down to the handset in the form factor but we're tablet centric and trying to guide ourselves toward that. That doesn't mean our content won't be enabled for smartphone, it will be, its just that from a design paradigm perspective we're trying to ensure those sales experiences in particular work best across those devices.

Different companies have different strategies. Are you focused on being early to market on every new device? Do you want to have your experiences perfect before deploying? Kind of call the Apple strategy although I would argue that some of their apps weren't perfect especially maps. So, but they've created a mystic around that their brand everything from Apple is kind of pristine and perfect and if that's part of your brand then you want to think about custom being your approach because you want it to be perfect before you push it out there. So really the last piece that is key is do your organizational abilities and your infrastructure aligned with the guiding principles and objectives, so it's one thing to say hey I want to be this but do you have the capabilities to actually deliver on it and that's the transitional piece of it, so in our objective at Bank of the West we're trying to transition to getting this content distributed broadly, we don't have the infrastructure right now. So we're overhauling that platform and then again I'm not trying to take the 2000, 3000 pages what have you that exist and make it some massive project, to port everything over to the new infrastructure that sounds like a painful project and it misses the mark on customizing and optimizing the experience as you go. But as you build that infrastructure and then as you bring experiences over and create new experiences and optimizing across that multi-channel experience that's when you tackle these things but you have to be deliberate about how you go about it.

Whichever way you go I think consistency is the key thing, so I am going to pick on myself a little bit and my days at Bank of America and many people know that Bank of America strategy was first to market on a lot of devices, a lot of apps, so this is the online banking accounts overview. Just focus on the top of the navigation accounts, bill pay, transfers, investments, customer service, some level 2 things that are important like alerts and BankAmeri deals or cash back deals in this case and then you go to handset, okay reasonably consistent at the app level, bill pay, transfers and deposits. I split the navigation in two, I've got accounts, deals, alerts across the bottom okay. Some could question why accounts moved, not sure, I was designing it but we had debates. This is first gen, you did stuff first gen and then you tried to re-tool but BofA was one of the first to market with the iPhone app. Then you go to tablet and then you get completely schizophrenic on the tablet. Then accounts included a new thing called calendar and then deals moves over and then bill pay and transfers and deposits are over to the right, then invoke the vertical navigation system using iconography, I have no idea. To this day I still have to relearn this thing every time I go into it because I don't use the tablet app all that frequently, I'll just use the website, but point being you can consistency really truly matters, so this is an app experience I've taken some creative lessons but it's comparison to the app experiences but as a user we didn't contemplate it in the context at that of oh we're really designing for the multi-device framework so there are some violations that came into play because people were debating internally how to optimize for that particular device and I would say that was, that should have not outweighed the fact that users were actually going to be accessing our site, our handset app, our tablet app in the context of the day the same day you know the same week.

So it doesn't mean you can't evolve, it doesn't mean you're saddled with online banking as your definitive experience from here forward, but you really test and learn on the newer devices and use that as your sandbox in your playground. But the one thing I would stress is the usability testing on multiple devices cannot be understated. If you bring people into a lab setting and you have and you've actually taken the time to design all the experiences, you have the mockups and prototypes of all the device types, put them through their paces, you know it simulates, okay this is day one of your session, we've usually done it where you have stations. Day one you're on a tablet, okay great, now your next use case you're going to come down here and you are going to pick up a handset and you're going to test yourself on the handset and the third task you're going to come over here and you are going to do it on a PC and watch people interact across all of those experiences in that same context and you find the breakage that's between devices, not necessarily, it may work perfectly within device but does it–how well does it work across devices. And I think that goes to what Ned was saying earlier on, I'm really thinking about that customer journey and experience and this is just the sort of operationalizing that and thinking of it and bringing it into that setting. And then your customers will tell you what's broken, your call centers will tell you what's broken, so listening to the voice of the customer and all the feedback mechanisms.

I know that there are a couple of different foresees here, I think Opinion Lab is here, you can talk to them about the feedback and response mechanisms, but connecting the dots between response mechanisms across devices is another important way to figure out if there's breakage in between what you experience on a PC and what you experience on a handset. So you know does it make sense on all devices and do you have to re-learn any paradigms, for example, if I have to re-learn where a navigation element is because I'm flipping and I infrequently access the iPad, that's a problem. Customers won't tell you that, they don't articulate usability and ease of use that way. People talk about ease of use but customers aren't going to articulate it quite that same way, it's the fact you move something and it doesn't feel as elegant, it doesn't feel simple because I'm a little bit lost. Being lost in an experience is what makes people uncomfortable and that causes them to not feel like it's a good experience, I don't know why but I don't like this.

So just a few – few kind of finishing thoughts on what does the multidevice world mean for the future? Are we going to have all the same content available mobile that we have on desktop? I don't know. As you tackle this do you really need all of it? You know we're trying to jettison a lot of things and I think others would probably agree, there are things that we've tried in the past that frankly you look at your traffic numbers, nobody goes there, is it really that important? And to what Chad and Jeff where talking about in terms of social and the content that's being produced there, I think we've evolved into realizing that you can create better content digestible content in chunks. Maybe it's the lead in for the 15-page white paper, we can do a better job with content and then use these devices and have it integrated in our experience, as well as social and have social referring back to these experiences, so it is kind of closed loop from that perspective. So you don't have to port 10,000 pages over. Do experienced designers operate horizontally, designing experiences across devices? How many people have a mobile design team? Yeah. So if you have a mobile design team that may–you may want to think about whether you need to have everyone be a mobile designer, just throwing it out there to be provocative? You know if you have a mobile design team that means they're designing exclusively for mobile theoretically, should they be looking at an experience and designing it across all the device types?

And if you extend that do you extend it to your product managers, do you actually create a hybrid within your organization, we're too small to have a hybrid, full disclosure, we're really small, so we don't have this luxury. But if you look at my legacy company BofA with you know 650 people on digital channels you can create a major structure and what I mean by that is that product managers that cut horizontally, so if you have somebody who is responsible for money movement, are they looking at money movement across all the device types, right? You're still going to have mobile product managers because you have to have an app strategy, you have to have ownership around that but by creating some horizontals in this and especially in the design side of it then you may find yourself evolving more quickly to a multi-device experience, evolving your multi-device experiences sort of in harmony with each other. So you don't have kind of the structure and the examples that I was pointing out with BofA where some of these things don't totally make sense. So I'm just throwing it out there, its something to think about, it's something we're wrestling with little bit even in our small organization, it's something from a design perspective that we're absolutely doing. We don't have a mobile design team, everyone is a mobile designer, all the interaction designers, all the visual designers are operating across it. When we look at new experiences we're putting it up in the conference room on the white board with all of the experiences looking at it in concert. We're testing with our customers, even if the only thing that's coming to market is the smartphone experience I'm still looking at it in the context of all of the devices so that I can challenge people and say does this work across all experiences? So, I'll take a few more minutes for questions but that's my two cents on Responsive.

[Applause]

Host: We do have a couple of minutes for questions if you want down in front.

Q: Quick question on response design, when a lot of our applications are third party things aren't responsive, aren't ready for mobile, so is that a bad user experience where I get the front and say the research and they go to take that call to action and then it's an epic fail?

A: Yeah, we're in a similar boat where we use a lot of third party solutions, so it's not a bad user experience. I mean I think we're trying to push our vendors as well though. Take funds transfer we're trying to work to make sure that–Five Serve shop, I know there are a lot of Five Serve customers in the room and Five Serve is not necessarily, its one Five Serve I'll tell you that, no offense to Five Serve. Anyway so they're still siloed, online banking is a legacy, brilliant product, you've got mobility, you've got check free bill pay, the cash solutions aren't well integrated, so that is breakage, I mean there's no question about that. It's more about trying to get them as a partner to get those things dovetailing together. I don't think there's a problem in the sales service experience paradigm shift that much. I think people give you some latitude on that.