In a survey of 50 mortgage firms – which included lenders, brokers and service providers – the digital business solutions agency, found usability test were often never conducted, with only 20% of firms saying they had undertaken them in the last month.
Dock9 said it was ‘disappointed’ at the results of the survey, which it carried out in a bid to find out the views of businesses on the digital experience their companies offered to customers and, if necessary, brokers.
Mark Lusted, managing director of Dock9, said: “For 12 years, we have been encouraging the financial services sector to involve users more in continuous testing programmes that enable businesses to constantly adapt and improve their digital experience according to customer preferences and needs, so these results make slightly disappointing reading.
“However, these findings clearly illustrate how the improvement of your customers’ digital experience can be a differentiator between you and your competitors, as many of them will not be undertaking any form of Usability Testing.
They survey also found around 50% thought the digital experience they provided was either good or excellent, although the flipside of this was that nearly 50% felt it was no better than fair with 15% believing describing it as ‘poor’.
Respondents were also asked about the barriers to implementing digital change and those that came to the forefront were resources (31%) and then business prioritisation (23%) with cost only being a barrier for 11%.
Lusted added: “The importance of digital channels has never been clearer, especially with the experiences and knock-on effects during the pandemic likely to shape how we all work and interact digitally going forward.
“We’re seeing many companies now moving forward with plans to seriously digitise previously manual processes as a first step, with a longer-term goal of moving from selling commodity products to delivering truly digitally enabled intelligent services.
“The most successful companies have embedded regular Usability Testing as part of the design and development process – if yours hasn’t already, now is the time to start”.
