Conventional wisdom ONCE said the best way to draw attention to an important message on a Web page was to put the information into a colorful, eye-catching graphic at the top of the screen. That's what officials at the Boston-based Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) believed until eye-tracking gear showed that user after user routinely ignored flashy boxes on the top of the screen and paid scant attention to the cheery, well-edited text in the middle.
"We discovered that Web users have learned to ignore the graphics at the top because they assume it's some banner ad that will distract them from their real work," says FCAT director Charles Brenner. "If we put a big red star with 'Open an Account' up there, no one cared. What people do first on any Web site is scan down the left column because they know from experience the real stuff is there ven the body of the site is kind of marketing-oriented. If you want to do business, you go to that table of contents on the left. That's become the standard for how things are done."
The left-column maxim is one of the golden nuggets of truth to come out of the usability lab at FCAT, which for 10 years has been developing and testing new technologies that benefit the companies owned by investment powerhouse Fidelity Investments. And it's one reason Fidelity's Web site has been rated among the most robust and easily navigable financial service storefronts on the Internet. In May, for instance, Gomez Advisors ranked Fidelity's Web site No. 1 for second quarter-ahead of Charles Schwab-praising its new Active Trader Pro and other enhanced functionality.
Incubator and R&D technology centers like FCAT were common a few years ago, but many seemed to fade with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. "A lot of the efforts in the mid-to-late '90s within the larger financial institutions like JP Morgan or a Citi have pretty much died away," says Michael Haney, a former Citibank executive, now senior analyst of the Securities and Investment Group at Celent Communications. "It made sense back then to have groups focus on new technologies. But most of those efforts did not make much money and sometimes conflicted with existing organizations."
In recent years, Citibank has rolled many of its e-business units and tech development entities-remember trying to connect the dots between e-Citi, Citi f-i and My Citi?-into its main business lines and Web portal. LabMorgan is still around, but decidedly less active, and its Web site hasn't been updated since mid-2001. Credit Suisse First Boston's CFSBNext e-commerce unit, too, has all but evaporated. "You have to remember that at one point, e-Citi alone was like 1,500 people globally," Haney says. "Most of them have been laid off or absorbed into traditional business lines."
According to Haney, Fidelity is a "slightly different beast" in more ways than one. As a privately held company, it is somewhat free of the bottom-line pressures that go along with answering to hungry stockholders. "Fidelity continues to invest heavily in technology and R&D regardless of market swings and they even have a chief wireless officer, which is unheard of at some of the larger, publicly traded institutions," Haney says.
WEB TECHNOLOGY FOR THE REAL WORLD
More importantly, FCAT makes sure that new applications and functionalities are actually usable and satisfy real business needs, he says. "They do a lot of the things that an e-Citi or a LabMorgan would have done, but their approach and level of commitment are different."
Robert Hegarty, vp of research, securities and investment at TowerGroup, says FCAT thrives in these uncertain times because it brings real-world conditions to assessing Web technology. FCAT has shown that the applications whose effectiveness can be easily demonstrated by users under realistic conditions stand the best chance of catching on. "You really have to look at FCAT's name, because that is somewhat of a bellwether of where these (R&D efforts) are headed," says Hegarty, who used to be a technology boss in the capital markets division at Fidelity. "It's the Center for Applied Technology, not Advanced Technology. They want to apply technology to business problems in a practical way."
What sets it apart, Hegarty says, is that FCAT tries to understand human behavior on the Web. "IT people understand technology, not human behavior on the Web. That's why these guys are so valuable."
Fidelity considers itself a technology leader in financial services, investing $2 billion a year in the exploration, development and testing of new functionality and services. Much of the R&D coming through FCAT is Web-related because the company's on-line services are a big part of its core business. About 90 percent of commissionable equity trades at Fidelity and more than half of its mutual fund transactions are done on-line. "We often say our Web site is, for many of our customers, the front door to Fidelity because of the proportion of transactions that take place there," Brenner says. "To many of our customers, the Web site is Fidelity. So we've got people across the firm contributing to the value that stands behind the Web site."
The heart and brain of FCAT is its usability lab, operated by the Human Interface Design (HID) Group. The usability lab really represents the last step in HID's problem-design-use process, Brenner says. "Usability only goes well if all the other things have been done correctly."
The usability lab is a pair of suites where two or three tests are always going on. In each suite, a user sits at PC and navigates new Web site applications and functionalities, sometimes while wearing eye-tracking telemetry equipment. "We don't do use eye tracking on every test because we want our customer users as comfortable and natural as possible," Brenner says. "Eye-tracking involves strapping you into this scary looking harness with mirrors and laser beams and all that. We use it from time to time to sort of reset our expectations of what works."
On the other side of a one-way mirror is a control room, where video equipment records the subject's strokes, clicks and eye movements. In a common area between the suites, corporate visitors can watch the tests via one-way mirrors and video monitors. The common area ties into one of the missions of FCAT: to help tell the Fidelity technology story. In the three years that FCAT has been open to customers and off-site employees, about 50,000 visitors have trekked through.
If any drama occurs in the lab, it is probably in its two large observation rooms, where designers and support staff huddle around conference tables watching the tests through a one-way mirror and on monitors. "There is often a lot of gnashing of teeth in that room," Brenner says with a chuckle. "They try to silently coax the person along with body English or whatever. It's kind of a splash of cold water sometimes to see what a person coming onto a new application design for the first time will do."
EARLY WINDOWS ON THE FUTURE
The first version of the usability lab dates back to the pre-Internet days of 1993 and focused on testing new desktop tools for phone representatives. "It was really a way of focusing a lot of things that had been going on for many years," Brenner says. "We were moving into graphical user interfaces and to Windows technology, and we wanted our own employees to be able to have consistent interfaces in their Windows applications, and this was before Windows had matured to the point where most applications looked pretty much alike."
As a workspace, FCAT is as user-friendly as the company Web site, which is not surprising since the facility was meant to be a model for other Fidelity offices. The cubicles have been designed to afford some privacy and are equipped with not only height-adjustable chairs, but height-adjustable desks and tables as well. Informal meetings are held in a common area with a cappuccino machine and a telescope for sky gazing. "When I conceived of the FCAT center, one of the things I noticed was that a lot of unusual architecture in workplace design had been the vision of one person, and that vision was then imposed on people who were going to have to live with it," Brenner says. "While I had my own ideas, I wanted to ensure that the design was a collaborative process, involving both our people's desires and expert information on the ways people really work together."
Brenner had this brainstorm at a time when dot-com IT people typically worked in big converted warehouses and aircraft hangars. "But IT people are not the most gregarious," he says. "We wanted the work environment to give people a modicum of privacy but also provide openness when that was going to make the most sense."
An adjustable desk is nice, but the people who like FCAT the most don't work there. Rachelle Robin, project director at Fidelity Brokerage Co., says she has benefited from HID services and its usability lab on two projects: the design of Automated Deposit Machines (ADM), which take check deposits, distribute the funds among accounts and print an image of the check on the receipt; and a branch kiosk customer-interface redesign that was part of a migration to XP (extreme programming) software.
Customers say they like the changes, she says, and the ADMs and kiosks won first and second prizes for best financial services application in 2002 at Kiosk Com. "In both of these two key products, we started out with HID," says Robin, who manages all customer-interface technology projects for Fidelity's 89 retail branches.
After doing a simulation in the usability lab, the ADMs went from concept to pilot in less than a year. The lab helped simplify the user interface and dissuaded Fidelity from adding functionality. "When we took a prototype to HID, they found that if we went beyond the simple four-step process to enable customers to buy fund positions at the ADM, it was going be quite a complex transaction. We learned it would never be successful because we were trying to add too much functionality."
Andy O'Connell, project manager in Fidelity Investments Institutional Services Co., last year ordered some usability testing at FCAT of a prototype on-line application system for AdvisorXpress, the site used by clients to sell Fidelity's Advisor mutual funds. "One of the things we realized was that some of the language on the application was really Fidelity jargon," O'Connell says.
BIOMETRICS AND SECURITY MADE PRACTICAL
While FCAT's chief mission has been about convenience and ease of use, center officials have begun to shift their sights to privacy and security issues. For the past three years, FCAT has been developing and testing prototypes of that holiest of grails in the realm of financial services security-biometric authentication devices. At the front entrance of FCAT at various times, a visitor might encounter all manner of devices-face recognition, iris scanning, fingerprint scanning, etc. Brenner believes that fingerprint recognition has the greatest promise, if only because the technology already exists in various forms and the equipment can be cheaply made. "To find a system that breaks the logjam between convenience and security is something we believe in, but its delivery has been a kind of ever-receding target," he says.
He expects fingerprint recognition to win in the long run. "It's probably the easiest to perfect of all the technologies," Brenner says. "It's only useful if it's ubiquitous. The problem with iris scanning is that it requires expensive, bulky equipment to get it right." FCAT has been developing prototypes of biometrics that customers can carry with them. "We haven't got it yet but we will get it."
FCAT is also working toward developing a natural language capability through text and speech that will enable the creation of a "virtual rep," Brenner says. "The whole area of natural language recognition is something that we think is going to become increasingly important. We've deployed systems to do that, but the current state of the art is somewhat primitive."
By contrast, Web-based functionality is becoming advanced, at least the text and hypertext version, though customers keep showing FCAT that it still has some way to go. "Our philosophy is that subjective opinion has no place in Web design," Brenner says. "The reason we put together the usability lab, with all of its telemetry gear and quantitative measures, is that, over and above the aesthetic appeal of the Web site, what works and what doesn't is something that is measurable. And by measuring it rigorously and trying out our new ideas against a population of customers, we can continuously hone what we're providing. So far, it's been very successful."
