ING Direct recently cleaned up their unwieldy global navigation by reducing the number of tabs from eight to six. The changes include moving the “My Links” tab under “Account Summary” and to move the “Preferences” tab under “My Info.” This is welcome news for ING Direct’s users burdened by a wave of tabs. But for us passionate about user experience and information architecture, both decisions make a lot of sense.

Global navigation for most websites are the digital manifestation of how they view themselves. For a task-based Website like most online bank, it’s a mixed bag of bubbling up the key tasks that customers are seeking with key products and services that the financial institution is trying to push. To ING’s credit, all the global navigation are both relevant and task-based. And I’m sure in their zest to be as user friendly as possible, they opted for providing information as quickly as possible by putting all the main tasks on the global navigation — the digital equivalent of putting all your popular products on a retail store end cap. But like all good things, they must come to an end.

Taken individually, the changes make sense from a logical and functional grouping sense. The tab “My Links” was a list of bank accounts held outside of ING Direct. Given that ING Direct treats both internal and external accounts virtually alike in the sense that customers can just as easily transfer money in and out of them, grouping them together makes sense. The other change was to merge “Preferences” with “My Info” which from an information architecture perspective is a no brainer. For customers, it means that they can manage all the things that are relevant to them, from their information on file to their privacy settings.

Fewer tabs on the navigation bar has the added benefit of giving customers more structure and control over their experience, while providing more space for other products and services, which seems likely given their track record of regularly introducing new products. But it also speaks to ING’s goal of being a different kind of bank, which means creating a virtual “My ING” online where customers feel as empowered online as they do face to face.

Things have been fairly quiet at Digital Insight lately since its acquisition by Intuit in February 2007. But based on some recent job postings, it appears that they’re trying to shake things up. The job descriptions begin by announcing that:

A new team within Intuit has been chartered to re-invent and re-imagine the Online Banking experience offered by Financial Institutions.

A tall order indeed. They conclude by saying that they’re looking for someone who can “make it happen.” We’ll keep an eye on this one, and see what the ‘it’ in “make it happen” will be.

Techcrunch reports on a new payment service called Noca with a focus on competing with PayPal, Google Checkout and Amazon Payments by offering drastically lower transaction fees and a focus on micropayments. Noca is currently offering a private beta of their service as well as two Facebook applications: OneClick Pay and HelpYourWorld. These are smart moves as both micropayments and charitable giving are a rather small portion of online payments, but one that can greatly benefit from a vendor with that as their focus.

As for the benefits to the consumer, Noca promises to provide strong and flexible incentives through cash back schemes, frequent flier miles, and the ability to designate a part of your payment to a charity of choice. The company also insists that its service will be substantially easier to use than others like PayPal, and that consumers will gain access to a much more comprehensive transaction history than they would get elsewhere.

Read the full article on Techcrunch.

Wells Fargo is following up on their recently redesigned public home page with a new online banking home page design to match both the look and feel of the public home page. The page is the first thing Wells Fargo online banking customers see when they login, and as such provides the main jumping off point for nearly all online banking activities. Their promo page highlights the following updates:

1. Improved Organization — Enjoy a clear view of all of your accounts and related activities in one location.

2. Communications Summary — Notifies you of important account-related messages and provides quick access to update account information.

3. Transfers & Payments — Easily access convenient transfer and payment options.

4. I Want To… Section — Quickly navigate to the services you use most frequently.

Vox, a customer experience consulting firm, recently released a study entitled Banking Mind Model Study, labeling it as a “customer experience analysis of consumer banking industry websites.” By claiming that it’s a study of customer experience, they are both overreaching (they only examine the bank’s home page, not what’s behind the login button) and misleading (banking mind model and customer experience are more complex than looking at home page heat maps and element distribution.)

The study looks at the home pages for several national and regional banks, and provides a score for usability and what they call a Mind Model Representation, which is a fancy way of saying a composite website of all banking websites — a Frankenstein of bank home pages. What a composite website has to do with customer experience, especially the customer experience of actual online banking and not just browsing a bank home page, is a mystery. The study is based on the following premise:

Analyzing the front door of a customer’s experience offers insight into user expectations from one side and a company’s focus and strategy on the other.

And this is the primary failure of the study. It boils down customer experience for online banking to a user’s first impression of the site. Usability experts disagree on many things, but what they do agree is that customer experience is the byproduct of the entire customer lifecycle and all their interactions with the company online and off. It’s also consistent with Jeff Bezos’s quote about a company’s brand: “It’s what customers say about you when you’re not in the room.”

The weakness of the usability findings are reflected in the study’s methodology when they cite that page scaling, search function and error messages for forms were the “noticeable improvements in usability.” This sounds more like a feature checklist around accessibility than usability. The study also cites industry trends like mobile banking and online banking, but offer no insight or analysis into either. Instead, the study mainly emphasizes the value of good usability practices by citing figures from Jakob Nielsen around the ROI of usability and customer experience.

While the bank survey makes for an interesting read, especially if you’re one of the bank executives in charge of your bank’s home page, it provides little utility and strategy for creating a successful online banking experience for actual customers.

I was skeptical when I first heard about Online Quicken. Why now? Would it be a knee jerk reaction to a slew of start-ups launching their own personal finance management tool, like Mint.com, Wesabe and Geezeo? Would this mean a stripped down version of the desktop version of Quicken, a Quicken Lite so to speak?

The answer, like all things, is a little bit of competition and customer demand. But the result is a well designed application, bringing some of the best features of desktop Quicken and removing some of its complexity. Online Quicken is indeed a stripped down version of its big brother, but it has some welcome features to look for when selecting an online money management tool. As they put it, their primary goal with this release is to give you a “tool that is a convenient introduction to finance that helps save you bank fees.”

What It Has

• Automatic bank aggregation (using the same technology used on their desktop version)
• Ask the Community forum
• Automatic categorization of transactions
• Ability to rename and add custom categories
• Ability to add upcoming transactions
• Ability to view your actual balance including upcoming transactions with the RealBalance feature
• Interactive pie charts of financial information
• Custom views by date through slider controls
• Added security beyond username/password
• Ajax controls for fast and contextual editing of transaction data
• Automatic bill reminders based on transaction history
• Bill reminders sent to email and sms
• Inline and tabbed editing of transaction data
• Support on Windows and Mac browsers, including iPhone

What It Does Not Have

• Cannot import/export data or transfer data from desktop versions of Quicken
• Limited ability to add investments, CDs, mortgages and loan accounts
• Ability to split transactions into multiple categories
• Cash account
• Ability to add sub-categories
• Contextual recommendations, tips or ads
• Ability to add Wells Fargo (expecting to add it in February)
• Budgeting

Quicken Online helps users solve the problem of tracking their finances by simplifying the account aggregation process, but more importantly by providing a cash flow-centric view of one’s finances. While others focus on spending, Quicken Online focuses on the difference between what’s coming in and what’s coming out over a period of time. Rather than providing recommendations, they leave it up to users to cut through the data to make sense of it, while providing them with tools to slice it up in every possible way.

One of the most elegant features are the pie charts, which allow you to select an expense or income category and instantly view all associated transactions directly from the graph. You can then filter the transactions by date as needed.

Another feature is the automatic categorization, which has become the standard for any finance application that seeks to simplify the task of managing one’s finances.

A big advantage that Online Quicken offers is its Excel-like interface to quickly edit transaction data. You can edit transactions inline without launching a new window, and quickly tab to the next editable field quickly and easily. This comes in handy for users who’ve come to expect the speed of desktop applications when editing information.

One of the big challenges of an online site entrusted to hold your financial information is security. Online Quicken takes a small step by adding a second layer of security (see below) after the username/password prompt. The extra security asks a question that supposedly only you can answer, such as selecting the name of the bank added to your account among several other banks. It’s a variation of the secret question that makes it that much harder to hack into a secure session.

Finally, Online Quicken provides a persistent timeline slider that can be moved at anytime to filter the data on the page in real time. In addition to viewing by a preset category, such as past 3 months, it also lets you slide back and forth the start and end dates. It provides a nice way to take a snapshot of ones activity and compare it against another similar period.

So, what to make of the differences between Quicken Online and Quicken Desktop? From the Get Rich Slowly blog, J.D. interviewed Intuit’s Jim Del Favero, who further explains that:

Quicken Online is targeted toward non-consumers of personal finance products. There’s a large segment of people who do nothing around personal finance. About 41% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Quicken desktop products are for people who know they want to be better, and are willing to seek out help. Young consumers aren’t willing to do that, but they still have personal finance needs.

Quicken Online marks a bold entry into the online PFM space, with a strong emphasis on cash flow, reporting, and organizing one’s finances. It also heats up the competition with online banking, and only time will tell if the $3/mo fee will be seen by its users as a bargain or bust.

The much anticipated wait is over. Online Quicken launched today, offering a 30 day free trial to sign-up and then it’s $3 per month thereafter. We’ll be writing a detailed product review shortly, but for now, you can see their video demo here. There’s also an iPhone version of the app.

As a long-time user of EZ Rider, a contactless payment method used on my local transit carrier (BART), I was pleased to see an even better alternative: paying for my tickets with my mobile phone. Instead of swiping the EZ Rider card, the service allows you to swipe your mobile phone over the sensors to open the fare gates. The card/phone is replenished periodically with automatic withdrawals from my bank account. The trial is being conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area for Sprint and Boost Mobile customers, and will be using a specially equipped phone for the duration of the trial.

My experience so far with the EZ Rider card has been flawless. It sits neatly in my wallet along with my other credit cards, and because it’s contactless, I place my wallet over the sensors without ever taking the card out. It works on the first try about 90% of the time (usually because I’m rushing passed it too fast), and a 100% the second time around. I’ve come to rely on it so much that I can’t imagine having to buy another ticket again — force feeding the ticket into the fare gate now seems almost like a bad magic act. The phone is a nice alternative, and it’s good to see public transit trying new ways to make it easier to ride. Granted, some of this technology is not new (Japan and South Korea lead the way here on large scale implementations), nonetheless it’s a payment trend that could take hold even here in the states.

You can read more about the Sprint Trial on their website.

The Financial Times reports that Facebook is planning to build “a payments system that would allow application developers to conduct transactions through the Facebook site.” The article cites a Facebook Developer Forum post asking for beta testers “to become part of a beta group of developers to discuss payments on Facebook.” Below is an excerpt from the full story:

When he launched the Facebook platform strategy in May, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, hinted that some kind of payment system could be in the works. Such a system would expand the revenue streams available to application writers by allowing them to charge users for premium services, or even sell items through Facebook outright, rather than relying on advertising to make money. Facebook could also benefit if it worked out a way to pocket a piece of each transaction run over its payments system.

Facebook faces an interesting choice in deciding how to proceed. It can go it alone, partner with a company with more experience in online payments (Ebay’s PayPal springs to mind), or offer a mix of payment options. Working with an experienced partner could soothe the nerves of users concerned about privacy in the wake of Facebook’s poor handling of its new Beacon advertising service.

There’s nothing like talk of recession to bring out money soothsayers willing to give personal finance advice. Everyone from your long-lost uncle to the neighbor next door all seem itching to dispense words of wisdom on how to grow your money. And the blogosphere has been no exception to this trend, with some truly fantastic bloggers emerging to provide real world advice on coping with financial difficulty and making sense of it all. If you’re a bank executive, you’d be well served to lend an ear to what they’re saying and doing. Inasmuch as the rise signals the downturn in the market, it also speaks to the greater control people seek in managing their money.

Nothing New 

The emergence of personal finance bloggers did not happen overnight, but it has taken on a new dimension lately with more and more ways to spend and save one’s money, and more and more tools to manage it. Social networking technology has added to the real world aspect of it. You no longer have to get advice from someone working for a large media conglomerate sitting behind a desk in New York City. In Get Rich Slowly, you can read thoughtful and insightful articles by someone who started giving advice on a whim:

I hoped that what I wrote might serve as a touchstone as I worked to pay off my debt and to develop an investment habit.

Others like Clever Dude talk about the ups and downs of everyday finances, as well as reducing taxes, and how he’s currently coping with losing his job.

Looking Out for Each Other

One other trend of these bloggers is that they’re always on the lookout for deals and saving money. They’re quick to let people know about high-yield savings accounts and no fee banking. If you trust someone’s financial advice, you’re more likely to follow it.

The social network and community aspect of it is also new. No longer is money management the sole purview of the super rich. Like-minded individuals can form online communities or go to online forums to discuss whatever is on their mind, like reducing debt, starting a small business or where to invest. Recently, HSBC was embroiled in a student protest against higher interest on overdrafts, organized primarily on Facebook. HSBC finally gave in to the mounting pressure in no small measure to the organizing power of Facebook.

Everyday Money

The personal finance bloggers also see money as an everyday preoccupation. But they also understand that money should not rule their life, but rather the other way around. Managing one’s money, and using it effectively becomes part and parcel of where they store their money (i.e., bank). For the most part, those  winning the hearts and minds of personal bloggers are financial institutions with high-yield accounts and low fees.

Banks for these bloggers are a commodity that can be switched out for a better rate or service elsewhere.  Money is also more fluid, with the ability to move money in and out at will. Getting the most for your money is the key. To win them over, financial institutions have to want more than just their service, but also what’s in their customer’s best interest.