Score one for design personas - Discover Financial Services Inc., which used this concept when designing its Web site, topped a study released last week on how easy it is to apply for credit cards online.
The issuer that came in second, National City Corp., said it also worked intensively with an outside firm and considered its target customers when shaping its card operations on the Internet.
The design personas concept, which Forrester Research Inc. has touted as one of the hottest in Web development, involves creating an ideal but fictitious customer and building a site meant to serve that customer's needs. The exercise helps companies pinpoint their desired demographics and create content that their target customers want.
When executives at Discover, a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, make decisions about Web site navigation and features, "it is not about any one person's opinion or the highest-ranking person in the room," said Colleen Zambole, its vice president of electronic commerce. "We have research behind it. It is not about 'Try it and see what happens.' "
Discover was one of two case studies in design personas that a Forrester analyst described at the Cambridge, Mass., firm's annual conference in May. The concept has since paid off by at least one measure: In its study, Change Sciences Group Inc., an Irvington, N.Y., consulting firm that helps banks make their Web sites easier to use, concluded that Discover makes it easier than any of its competitors to apply for a card online.
Steven Ellis, Change Sciences' founder and a partner, said that Discover's site did well because it took little effort to find an application form there.
Ms. Zambole said that when Discover developed its online card applications, the design process was somewhat freewheeling but now it is rooted firmly in research and customer feedback.
"We make sure we have an approach," she said. "We did usability testing and made changes."
Change Sciences, which conducted its research this quarter, in part by watching ordinary Web surfers shop for cards, gave National City Card Services particularly high marks for its product comparison feature.
Robert Strunk, a vice president of the Internet group at the Cleveland banking company's card unit, said that he had used a design firm to find out exactly how customers view and use Web pages.
"The Web site is always being evaluated internally to help us keep our eye on the ball," he said. "We made a strategic decision a couple of years back to really begin to mine the Internet, but cautiously."
In designing the comparison feature, Mr. Strunk said he tried to present succinct information and not overwhelm customers with details.
Change Sciences - whose clients include Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Washington Mutual Inc. - said that it graded the sites in part by how many clicks it took to get to the card section. That may explain why some full-service banks did not fare as well as Discover, a monoline.
But Mr. Ellis said that even though full-service banks like Citi and FleetBoston Financial Corp. might have been at a disadvantage, because of the range of products they offer, some monolines also did poorly, because their sites push products other than cards, so it was harder to get to their card applications.
In one sign of the whimsical nature of such rankings, Citi and American Express Co., which Gomez Inc. rates as the best-run card Web sites, came in ninth and 10th, respectively, in the Change Sciences survey. Mr. Ellis said Amex made it too difficult for customers to find the credit card portion of the site and to compare offers once they got there. Also, some of the text was too small to read easily, he said.
Then again, given the experience of NextCard Inc., the card firm that went bust by making it too easy for people with poor credit to get cards online, there may be some good reasons for making online applications something other than no-brainers.
Anthony Mitchell, a spokesman for Amex, said it considers its site a constant work-in-progress. "We are still evaluating our site and looking at ways to add capabilities to it."
Citi did not return phone calls for this article. Mr. Ellis said it lost points for making the application process too lengthy and for having unclear labels on some of the information it sought in its application. If a customer made a mistake when filling out the form, the error message did not make it clear what was done wrong. Problems like that make applicants give up, he said.
Change Sciences also subtracted points for trying too hard to cross-sell during the card application process, he said. For example, Bank of America Corp. offered an optional security plan at the beginning of its application process, and Discover's pitch for a free Discover 2Go card diverted the focus from its application, he said.
"We don't like cross-selling and upselling," Mr. Ellis said. "Citibank and Bank of America stumbled during this process, because they try to cross-sell, which can get customers off track. Don't try to do it in the middle of the process."
Mr. Zambole shrugged off the criticism of Discover's keychain card as "their opinion" and said much thought had gone into how to offer it to new cardholders.
