Know-How Exchange : Branding

Frances

www.mldirect.ml.com which is Merrill Lynch direct referred to me by a good friend and www.statefarm.com has good insurance products I've used. both websites easy to manuever through.

Deremiah, *CPE

my personal favorite is ml.com - it's easy to use, and I don't need to sign in

Frances,

I could be wrong but here's my observation after spending over half a decade in accounting I saw a lot of systematic structure unnecessarily applied. I'm not sure if it's the personalities of the industry workers who design these things or the fact that people are use to seeing these things a certain way. It's probably a mixture of both. I am tempted to say it's the nature of the beast. It does not always have to be mostly very formal, unfriendly and bureaucratic but a great deal of the time it is. Having a financial background and a art background this is one of the areas where I tend to challenge both groups (the business minded and the artistic minded). If I can think up any good FS sites I've been on I'll send them to you. Thanks.

Your Servant, Deremiah, *CPE

Frances, I'm not a user myself, but I remember someone telling me how much they liked www.bigcharts.com for its great visuals of stock performance.

Hands down, however, my all time favorite web ANYTHING is the amazing Map of the Market on www.smartmoney.com. It takes only a couple of minutes to understand, and when you "get it," you can grasp the overall market performance in a short glance. It does take a few moments to load, but it is well worth the short wait.

Basically, a rectangle represents the whole market. Within that boundary, there are other rectangles representing industries, and the size of those rectangles represents volume of trading. Within those boundaries, rectangles represent sub-categories of industries. And within those, there are rectangles representing publicly traded corporations. Not only are those "deepest" rectangles sized for trading volume, but they are also color coded in varying intensities of green-to-red to represent rising or falling stock prices. When you hover your mouse over any spot, a dynamic window pops up with that stock's performance within the last few minutes; when you click, a menu appears that enables you to drill down to a dozen or more areas of detail.

I'm gushing, aren't I? Can't help myself. Whenever I do a presentation about Information Design, I use Map of the Market as the quintessential example of brilliance in action!

Shelley

https://www.netbank.com/
Don't have Branches.

New Study Highlights Online Self-Service Flaws Among Retail Banks
Research shows many Web sites deliver an inconsistent and frustrating customer experience.
by Joshua Weinberger
Thursday, April 15, 2004

Customers relying on the Web sites of the top U.S. retail banks are unlikely to have a satisfactory experience, according to a new study by the Allen Bonde Group (ABG), a market research and management consulting firm based in Wellesley Hills, MA.

Focusing on two key metrics -- effective search and navigation, and site availability and performance -- the new study concludes that many retail banking sites "provide a confusing or frustrating user experience." In fact, 20 percent of sites surveyed don't even offer a search function at all on their home pages for consumers.

Of the 40 sites that offered a search function, only seven were able to answer successfully ABG's three sample search queries: "Where are your bank branches?" "Do you offer a 20-year fixed-rate mortgage?"and "How do I contact customer service?. Twenty-five were unable to answer any of the three.

Even when a search produces a result, however, ABG contends that the results don't often provide a useful answer. On average, about 67 percent of sites with a search engine provided at least some response, "but about 75 percent of the time the information was irrelevant," the report found. In other words, the study says, "Web sites can be highly effective at providing the wrong information."

The Web sites of several large banks performed admirably in ABG's study, with those of SunTrust, Bank of America, and Wachovia topping the list. Other top performers in terms of search effectiveness included AmSouth Bank, Huntington Bancshares, Charter One Bank, and Charles Schwab. ABG ascribed these success stories to natural language search and navigation tools, noting that sites with those features "performed better than their peers, and consistently did well on a broad range of queries, showing both the effectiveness and flexibility of their enhanced search capabilities."

I hope this helps,

Juan Carlos

Frances, after I recovered from my earlier gush, I realized you were really looking for transactional website examples. Maybe you should look at PayPal! Not perfect, but effective.

Hey, you could deposit $1,000 into my PayPal account so you can experience the transaction firsthand!

Shelley :Þ