Web 2.

0 @ UBS
Andreas Bossard
www.andreasbossard.com

Web 2.0 @ UBS .............................................................................. 1

How Web 2.0 ideas can help UBS...................................................... 2
Improve communication between customers and UBS ...................... 2
Why do people not use the mailbox in the E-Banking Application? ... 2
How to improve E-Banking based on these issues.......................... 2
How UBS clients facing applications can be improved .......................... 5
User Centered Design................................................................... 5
Using the data of past payments as templates ................................. 5
Use design patterns ..................................................................... 6
Mobile banking ............................................................................... 8
Why mobile banking did not work .................................................. 8
Short term opportunities............................................................... 9
Long term opportunities ............................................................... 9
Summary ...................................................................................... 0
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How Web 2.0 ideas can help UBS

Improve communication between customers and UBS

A lot of websites who use the concept of Web 2.0 (for example Facebook) take
advantage of the human need for social contacts. In the field of online banking such a
networking of the users is difficult, because you don't want your friends to know how
much you spend for what. However it's possible to improve the relationship with UBS, by
setting the focus of UBS e-banking more on communication.

Why do people not use the mailbox in the E-Banking Application?

• If you click on "Mailbox" you first see the E-Documents, which are only one-way-
communication, so the customer does not get the idea that the mailbox is really
for active communication with the team of UBS, but more for notifications from
the system or administrative messages to UBS like "my contact details changed".
• In the messages-section the sender-column contains unpersonal sender-names
like "PK-B-POOL MITTELLAND". Only if I open the message, I see who sent it.
This strengthens the impression that the messaging-system is rather unpersonal.
• I once sent a suggestion how to improve the E-Documents-System: "Getting
notifications by E-Mail when an E-Document is received, as a reminder." The
only answer in the mailbox was that it was forwarded to the responsible division
of UBS. When I look at the idea now, I guess it is not possible to implement,
because of legal issues, but still, there was no further reply if it can be
implemented or what the team thought about the idea.

How to improve E-Banking based on these issues

• Contact center: Create a contact center, which contains:

◦ Contact information of the customer advisor and ideally a picture of him/
her. This implies to assign a customer advisor even to small private
clients.
◦ A list of the past conversations to easily refind topics. The term
"conversation" is also more personal than the current term "Mailbox".
◦ See the following image for a visualization of these ideas.

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• Personal news on the homepage: The homepage is very static and shows
only my accounts (in my personal e-banking-account, strangely I don't have the
box "Information and news" which is shown in the UBS e-banking demo
application). In order to show the user that he can use the e-banking application
as a communication tool, it would be a good idea to show personal messages
instead of the "Information and news" box. These personal messages could be
delivered depending on the needs and current life-situation of the customer.
Some examples:
◦ To clients between 25 and 30 years a message could be shown like "do
provision for your old age and save on taxes"
◦ If a couple has a an e-banking contract together they could be shown
special offers for couples.
◦ For younger customers, like for example students, this personal news
box could also contain messages about cheaper tickets to the cinema
etc.
◦ Some of these messages of course would link to the contact dashboard
in order for clients to get more information from the customer advisor for
these special offers.
◦ See the following image for a visualization of these ideas.

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• Embrace customer feedback: One important concept of Web 2.0 is to see

your customer as a partner, who helps you to improve your product. Embrace
passionate customers. If a customer gives you ideas how to improve for example
the E-Documents-System, he is a passionate client. Appreciate his feedback and
keep him updated on what happens with his feedback, or why you can't
implement his ideas. If you do not do that, you can tell him "thank you for your
feedback" a thousand times, he will not believe you and maybe turn to another
bank. Show him that you mean it.
Make it as easy as possible for the user to get in touch with UBS. For example
people talk about UBS all the time on Twitter: http://twitter.com/
#search?q=ubs. If UBS would take part in the conversation on Twitter, that
would be a huge potential to appeal to younger people. Railservice is a good
example (even though it's not officially by SBB) they talk directly to the
customers: http://twitter.com/RailService
Facebook pages are a good way to contact fans. For example there is already a
page for UBS: http://www.facebook.com/ubs.switzerland with more than 4000
fans. But if that page was not created by UBS, then you have no possibilty to
contact them. Marketing in Web 2.0 requires a creative approach. Like for
example the "We produce the green Yogi drink again if our Facebook page has
20'000 fans"-campaign by Emmi: http://www.emmi.ch/deutsch/
molkereiprodukte/jogurt-und-milch-drinks/yogi-drink/
There are even platforms for Web 2.0 customer service. For example
http://getsatisfaction.com/ is used by companies like Google to talk with users
about new features for their applications.

These suggestions would make the e-banking application more personal and animate the
users to get in touch with UBS. But be prepared that your customer service will also
have to handle more messages because of such a design change. Therefore you will
possibly need more resources for customer service, but of course you will potentially also
get more acquisitions.

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However, don't let these Web 2.0 features get too much in the way of other goals like
"making a payment" or "checking my account". User centered design as explained in the
next section should help you keeping the application usable while improving the contact
with the customer.

How UBS clients facing applications can be improved

User Centered Design

Write down the main goal of the application. Is the main goal to improve the
communication and the relationship to your client or is it more important that the
customer can get things done (payments etc.)? Once you start from this strategy-level
it's easier to go into more detail and define single tasks (e.g. "make a payment") and
weight the importance of features. Prototypes then can be evaluated and usability-tests
can be defined, based on these tasks.
User Centered Design has some more methods than the ones mentioned above. They
are really helpful to design an application according to the needs of the users, opposed
to the conservative way of having a list of features and putting them together into an
application.

Using the data of past payments as templates

The data of already sent payments would be automatically saved and could easily be
reused later. You don't have to enter all the data again. The workflow would be as
following:

• The user starts entering the first characters of the remittee's name (or account
number)
• While the user is typing, a box shows suggestions of names (account numbers)
the user already sent payments to (see the following image).

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• The user selects one of these names

• All other details like account-number, reference number etc. are populated with
the data from the last payment.

The "Save as template"-functionality of the current e-banking application is somewhat

similar, but the difference is that the templates are not saved automatically and cannot
be reused that easily.
I had huge problems to use the "Save as template"-functionality, because the only
possibility I have seen to save a template is directly after I sent a payment. But there is
no possibility to save already executed orders as a template. By automatically saving the
past orders as templates, the user does not need to actively save an order as a template
and the reuse of templates is much more intuitive. The user does not need to
understand a concept like "templates". He just uses past orders directly as templates
without knowing what a template is.

Use design patterns

Design patterns are regularly used user interface elements in the world wide web, to
which users got used to and which can improve the interaction. Web browsers have
more capabilities than 5 years ago, modern Web 2.0 applications take advantage of
these increased capabilities to make the user experience more seamless and more
comfortable.

Examples for design patterns that could be used:

• Search-as-you-type to search for already used remittees. (see section "Using
the data of past payments as templates"). Example: Google Search:

• Inline error checking before a form is sent. This has the advantage that the
user doesn't have to fear to get an error message after he clicked on the submit
button. He can be assured that all the entered information is correct when he
submits the form. Example: Twitter sign up:

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• Fill textfields automatically: If the user enters information that can be used
by the application to fill other fields, the application should do this. For example
in the section "payment within Switzerland" if you enter an IBAN number you do
not have to select the clearing number. But the clearing number is only filled
after you clicked on the button "Continue". This could be made more user-
friendly: As soon as an IBAN number was entered the application should fill out
the clearing number field.
• Inline help: The small "information icons" that give inline help are a very good
idea, but currently the amount of information is very limited. For example on the
orange payment slip there is an information icon for the Notifications ("Single
booking without advice" etc.). But it gives no explanation of the notification-
options, instead it suggest to consult the help section. A short information about
each type of notification would be much better. Or if the information gets too
long at least a direct link to the according section of the help section should be
provided. Example: Flickr "Privacy and Permissions" screen:

• Date-Selector not in a popup-window: The date-selector in the payment

screens is currently displayed in a pop-up. Pop-up usually don't appear instantly
and they can appear somewhere on the page, but it makes sense to have them
directly near the date textfield. Plus the pop-up uses dropdowns to select month
and year, which is more cumbersome to use than simple back- and forward-
buttons.
A good alternative would be to use a javascript library to instantly show a date-
selector. Example: jqueryui.com:

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• A customizable homepage (dashboard): Some customers may don't want to

have certain elements like the "News and information" box on the homepage or
for some it's more important to have "Account and custody account overview" at
the top of the homepage. This can be achieved by making the homepage a so-
called "dashboard" - a page containing different elements, that can be added or
removed, and moved around to suit the needs of the user. Example: iGoogle-
Page:

Mobile banking

Why mobile banking did not work

Andreas Hoffmann mentioned in his talk, that UBS already provided mobile banking in
the past, but it didn't work. I assume that was in the time when WAP was state-of-the-
art. WAP was very cumbersome to use, and therefore it never took off. Bigger screens
with touch functionality and full keyboards instead of keypads make usage of mobile
applications much more convenient nowadays. Plus, a few years ago prices for web
access on the cell phone were exorbitant.

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Short term opportunities

• A mobile application is not a smaller version of a desktop application:

Mobile applications and mobile web follow other usage patterns than desktop
applications. One of the big mistakes is to take all the functionality from the
desktop application and try to put it on the mobile application. This does not
work. A cell phone has a small screen, therefore the application needs to be as
simple as possible. Plus if a lot of typing is needed, the task may be easier to do
on the desktop.
Example: Checking the last few transactions on your account might be an easy
task on the cell phone, but will someone really fill out an orange payment slip on
his cell phone? However, innovative usage of cell phone features could make this
task even easier than on the desktop: Take a photograph of the orange payment
slip and use optical character recognition to fill out the needed fields of the form.
• Context is important, think in scenarios: In the mobile environment it's even
more important than on the desktop to think in scenarios. Take the context into
concern: Where is the user? How much time does he have to do the task in the
application? For example: He is waiting for the bus and the sun makes it hard to
read anything on the screen.
• Know how the customer uses the application: Bring only the functionality
that makes sense to the cell phone. Therefore you need to find out what part of
e-banking makes sense on a mobile phone. A good way to find it out is to test a
prototype with users. Example question that can be answered through such
tests: "Did they use the prototype in trains? Why not?". "Which functionality is
cumbersome to use on the mobile phone? Why?".

Scenarios and user tests are methods of User Centered Design. That's why I
recommend, especially for mobile applications, to familiarize yourself with User Centered
Design methods.

Long term opportunities

As soon as it's possible to pay with the cell phone, new applications can make the life of
the customer easier. Like for example a budgeting application that automatically keeps
track of all expenses and tries to assign the expenses to certain fields of the budget (e.g.
"food" or "entertainment"). Maybe it makes sense to cooperate with some application
developer who has already knowledge in the field of budget planning applications. Like
for example Mint, which Andreas Hoffmann mentioned on one of his slides.

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Summary

This whitepaper shows some possible uses of the Web 2.0 concept for UBS. UBS e-
banking should concentrate more on communication with the customer and add more
personal elements. Web 2.0 applications like Twitter are a huge chance for authentic
customer service not only for the e-banking application but for the whole bank. Current
design patterns from the web should be adapted to make UBS e-banking more user-
friendly. User Centered Design is presented as a good way to improve the usability of
the desktop e-banking application and as an essential part for designing a mobile e-
banking application. Finally some principles for designing a mobile banking application
are explained.

December 19th, 2009 Andreas Bossard