At Discover Bank, the management team recognized that customers were looking for the most user-friendly and robust online bill payment solution possible. Their research had proven that customers who use online banking and bill payment tended to be more loyal and profitable, and more likely to utilize additional services. And the stickiness factor was clear: customers would maintain close ties with the bank to avoid setting up their payees all over again.

The sticky nature of online bill payment is verified by Fiserv’s payment trends study, which found that nearly half (49%) of respondents said online bill payment service would make them less likely to switch banks, and that two-thirds (69%) would recommend the service.

Fusebox worked closely with Discover Bank on their Bill Pay Strategy, UX Design, Front-end Engineering and Integration.

Discover Bank’s Bill Pay Services include:

• Real-time activity – a real-time view of bill payment activity, including funding balance, pending payments and payment posting information.
• Next-day payments – the ability to make next-day payments to many companies with which the customer does business.
• Predictable payments – a “due date” model that credits the payee’s account the same day the payer’s account is debited.

By focusing on the needs of their loyal customer community, Discover Bank and Fusebox were able to develop an effective, easy to use bill pay solution that saves users precious time and effort.

Our assessment uses the popular system usability scale (SUS) framework to come up with an industry standard score that evaluates the system as a whole. SUS comprises a high level questionairre that by design is quite general. We want to identify if the system in question is inherantly problematic or not. If it is problematic, we’ll dig deeper, if not, we’re ready to move on.

The questionairre asks a user to respond from a list of statements using a five-point Likert scale that ranges from Strong Disagreement to Strong Agreement.

Here’s a sample per question response that I’m sure you are all familiar with:

Here’s the standard questionairre. You can also find it over at usability.gov.

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought the system was easy to use.
4. I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system.
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use.
9. I felt very confident using the system.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.

Scoring is simple and normalized to a 100 point scale. There is a possible score per question of either 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. In order to ensure no bias towards any of the statements with respect to agreement or disagreement, questions 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 give more points to Strong Agreement (ie Strong Agreement = 4 points), while questions 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 give more points to Strong Disagreement (ie Strong Disagreement = 4 points).

In order to base this on a 100 point scale for the 10 questions, we simply need to sum the score for each question and multiply that number by 2.5. One great aspect of the SUS is its ability to give you a simple single usability score that you can compare across products and systems (your competitors, best of breed solutions, your old website, etc.).

Scoring

But how do you know what score is sufficient? If you are greater than 50, 60, 70, or 80, are you at an acceptable level? There isn’t to much literature out there on that topic but the folks at the measuring usability blog have done some interesting analytics and comparisons across industry. We generally take a simple back of the envelope analysis which suggests that if you were to receive 3 points on every question (that is, above the median, but not perfect), you’d score a 75. We take this as a proxy for a job mostly well done. For general purpose websites, we like to see scores that hover around that point and generally 70 is a number that we like to accept.

You won’t necessarily get too much insight into what the drivers causing issues actually are with SUS, although in practice, it’s often times easy to know where to start. We’ll often use SUS as a filter to let us know whether we need to dig deeper into all the tape, heatmaps, and screens that we captured during detailed usability studies. We talk about details in our next post.

Through the Pathway to Financial Success program, Discover is awarding up to $10 million in financial education grants to schools across the country. To make it easy for time-challenged school administrators and teachers to get involved, Fusebox implemented a simple online registration and grant submission and evaluation process. In addition, the ability to search by zip code for their school information enables parents and students to connect with their administrators and bring awareness to this program.

Fusebox worked closely with Discover and its partners to create a site that educates about financial responsibility in a fun, exciting, and interactive way. Tips and tools for both students and parents are served up through various engaging media—from online games to videos to articles.

The Pathway to Financial Success program aims to create a movement with parents, educators, and a community of partners to give our students the tools they need to create a solid financial future for themselves. This month’s launch is an exciting beginning… and we can’t wait to hear about how students’ and families’ lives have been empowered by the effort.