In part one of our series on website usability, we looked at the all-important homepage. But the best homepage won’t do you much good unless you can convert visitors into paying customers. For that you need an effective sales process capped by an easy-to-use application. Online credit applications have evolved considerably during the past five years and are now relatively painless to complete, usually far superior to their paper counterparts, which are plagued with missing data, illegible markings, not to mention transcription errors in your own back office.

At OBR, we’ve looked at online application-form design on a number of occasions, finding a wide variety in quality (see Table 11, below). This time, we are using a more rigorous approach applying our proprietary OBR WebCheck criteria www.webcheckanalysis.com  and scoring Citibank’s application across 54 criteria. Although the bank’s application is very good, there is still much room for improvement, as witnessed by its sub-50% score.

Citibank credit card application

Card application

Table 12
Citibank Credit Card Application Process

OBR analysis using WebCheck* criteria

Source: Online Banking Report, 2/04 Wt = weight with 5 the highest importance