Usability studies with 5 credit unions
We ran an experiment with 4 credit union website designs to see how easily people can log in to online banking.
The goal
The credit unions that participated in this study wanted to know if their log-in button placement makes it as easy as possible for users to access their online banking log in.
The hypothesis
At BloomCU we follow the Laws of UX in our work. Among those laws is one we thought would be relevant in this study. That law is Jakob’s Law which states, “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.” For example, the top four most visited websites in the world—Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—all place their log in button in the top right corner. So, we decided to put this law to the test.
The usability tests
We ran a usability study with four credit union website designs to see how easily people can log in to online banking if the log in button is placed on the top right side of the navigation bar. These studies involved a total of 20 study participants. In the experiment, we gave users a few specific tasks. Among those tasks, they were asked to log into online banking. We measured how quickly they could locate the log in button.
The results
100% of the study participants were able to find the log in button within 1-2 seconds, which is very fast for any task. All participants described the task as being easy to complete. Two of the designs in our experiment used a lock icon on the button. Two users described the lock button as being slightly confusing.
The takeaways
From this usability testing, we learn three big takeaways:
- The top right area of your navigation bar is the best place to put your log in button.
- An icon on your log in button might initially confuse users.
- Usability testing can help you learn the truth about a page. As they say, “Don’t guess, test.”