Stone Soup of an Online Business

Looks like Public Bank e-Banking system has learnt the lesson from Maybank2U and start to include the following alert of the website. Too bad, they might want to stick to just one domain and make people less confuse.
Sometimes, options may not be a good thing :)

When you submit a payment online through your credit card, a request (A) will be sent to the bank to verify if your account has the sufficient credit. If yes, bank will issue a ’sufficient credit’ request (B) back and finally you will be directed to a success page (C).
Link A, B and C can [...]

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A product in its final stage limits the way users think. The almost-done Maybank2U website will sure get lot of useful feedbacks, but I bet not much on the fundamental which is crucial to get the magic numbers mentioned by Shareza.

Just look at my earlier post on Jo-jo’s Challenge. We have collected about 33 feedbacks for just one form, extracted from an online hotel booking website.

This is the current website of Maybank2U. The Maybank2U team done a great work to build this from scracth. It is not easy, especially when you’re dealing with large number of users and important data. The decision to revamp come at the right time. If the old website was built to attract more visitors (during those days when it was new), the revamped version should have focused in the conversion rate or meeting goals. In short, to increase Maybank’s revenue and to decrease Maybank’s operating cost!

I managed to take this picture showing some important practices during the presentation. Too bad, the pages in the new website are still fighting for space :)

Allow me to quickly go through some of my humble and nothing-new feedbacks. I would love to jump to the end of the post which I am going to propose and touch the painful part of the change - The Fundamental!

Don’t be surprised, many visitors can not tell the difference between the two pictures in quick.

I couldn’t find the login box in the main page like what we have in Paypal? A touching personalization can be redundant. Quick math, if you will to login 100 times to Maybank2U in your lifetime, that means the New User link will appear 99 times to you unused. Not just that, you have just forced someone to make 99 decisions of not clicking on that particular link. Don’t make a choice.

Most often, user experience has a lot to do with the Contact us form. Imagine, it serves as the best time and place where you can turn someone’s experience of using your website better. They can be your best friend who promote the website for you, not of fancy technology but some little nice experience. A good form receives fewer support request, saving operational cost greatly. I have reviewed the Contact us form of Alliance Bank in the past, check it out. An example of Contact us form in good use.

Sign up form - one of the most important page where visitors are converted into Maybank2U users. Yet, too many options, and I wonder why the online method should not be given priority as like the big button in WordPress. Yet, this is not much different from the first version. This explains why 1,500 pages are way too difficult to focus your bullet (budget and time) on. Probably that answer to Yowchuan’s question on how much is the cost of revamp during the preview launch today.

I would love to have location map if this is not too much of work :)

The Fundamental Feedback?

My Maybank2Me directs me to a secure page with big login button. There is a clear instruction to tell people how to ensure they are landed in the non-phishing page. I don’t have to choose if I am a new user, the system will do this dirty job for me. My online system reminds me if there is a recurring payment to make such as rental and the list go on…

The rest of information such as banking, credit card, lifestyles updates, promotions, sign up instructions and contact us form are separated from the online banking system.

Who knows, I could have one version for people like my dad? Lite, easy to use, and probably they could belong to the last group of users who will continue ’supporting’ the physical banks :)

Keep it up, Maybank2U Team!

I must be kidding. Yes, I don’t have a Maybank2U account.

Some related posts I have written in the past. They have a lot to do with UI.

- Truly first come first serve system must be discriminative!
- Acmamall.com, more stones needed
- What’s system design to do with marketing?
- I Hate Big Pencil

“People would have said they want a faster horse (Henry Ford, 1903)”

You would probably get the same answer if you are asking someone before a car was invented. The Maybank2U website has about 1 million active users now. This is the best real data one can have when come to revamping a website. You have all the answers, from percentage of people who never change their password, to average amount of transaction in details.

I was skeptical especially when there are too much user involvement during the user experience studies. Various test are included but this can eventually turn out to be a faster horse. Yes, everyone fancy about uploading and sharing videos, but no one will tell the founder of YouTube to build it that way.

When asked about the estimation of the increase of conversion after the revamp, I was told by Shareza that they are expecting the current active users to grow from 1 million to 1.5 millions in three months. In layman terms, this means an additional 500 thousands users will become active with the new design, if number of visitors remains the same (or 50% increase of visitors while conversion rate remains).

Few groups of potential active users come into my mind, including my dad who is computer illiterate, locals who speak just Bahasa, Mandarin or Tamil, international users who are not speaking English, my brother-in-law who want everything from font-size to input box big… Not to mention myself who just want to get my transaction done with shortest possible click, doesn’t really care if it is PBEOnline or Mayban2U.

The new revamp reduces number of pages from 3,000 to 1,500, which is still way too much to digest. Why not 10 or 20 pages? To me, Google search engines has only 2 pages: main page and search result page. It is about getting things done.