Before we launch into product and marketing strategies, let’s step back and reflect a moment on what users are trying to accomplish when they sign-up for “online banking.”

Source: Online Banking Report, 6/000

¹We call it the illusion of real-time processing, because users don’t so much care whether a transaction is processed in real-time or batch mode, what they care about is that they can SEE that you have accepted their transaction and have adjusted balances accordingly; the actual debits and credits can be handled behind the scenes in batch mode

²It’s extremely difficult to describe what’s “right” in words, but  we know it when we see it; for example, we recently happened upon Legacy Bank’s Web site when we saw its CEO quoted in an article in American Banker (see screenshot below)

³We are fully aware that the advertising research says that pictures of happy people make your bank seem more user-friendly; that works fine in the branch and take-one brochure rack, but it works the opposite on the Web where users must wait to download the pretty pictures