Banking Mental Models: Testing A Prototype

The Challenge:

A leading bank created a prototype to replace their existing app. Their design team wanted to understand user's mental models and whether or not their prototype was easier to navigate compared to their current app.

What I did:

• Recruited a total of 20 participants, half ‘traditional’ bank users and the other half ‘fintech’ challenger bank users. All had to use an app to bank. I chose to recruit only those who used an app to bank because the client was interested in the mental model that people have when using an app rather than a desktop to bank.

Card-sort:

• I ran a closed card-sort with participants in order to uncover the mental models behind their expectations of information architecture in banking. One of the issues I found with this task was that we had a mis-recruit, who predominantly used a desktop to bank rather than an app.

Moderated Usability Test:

• I ran a tree-test based on situational tasks with all participants in order to test how easy the prototype was to navigate compared to the clients current app. Instead of using time taken to complete a task as the metric for analysing ease, I chose to have the participants self-record ease. I did this because time taken to complete a task is not a robust metric of comprehension of tasks.

Reflection:

• As I used a tree-test structure versus the prototype itself, the conditions of the study were not especially close to a real-life setting. If I were to do this study again, I would at least supplement this method with ethnographic methods.

• Another limitation that I faced in the tree-test was that some of our participants were from North America, therefore some of the tasks such as setting up a current account had different names in the US. Therefore, there was a misunderstanding within some of the tasks within this test that had little to do with the IA.