Analyzing Usability of Mobile Banking Applications in Pakistan

Abstract

Usability is a key factor in the quality of the product, which includes ease of use, user satisfaction and the ability of the user to quickly understand the product without practice. As smartphone usage increases, most organizations have shifted their services to mobile applications, such as m-banking. Most of the people uses banking services but hesitate to use m-banking due to complex interfaces. Usability researchers concentrate on the value of design simplicity so that users can perform a particular task with satisfaction, efficiency, and effectiveness. If a mobile app lacks one of these usability features, users may get confused while using the app. This research examines the key usability issues in existing m-banking after checking the usability satisfaction level through System Usability Scale. To compare and highlight a number of usability issues, the researcher used two types of usability evaluation method 'User Testing' and 'Heuristic Evaluation'. In heuristic evaluation expert users used two M-banking apps i.e. Bank of Punjab (BOP) and MCB Islamic Bank (MIB) to evaluate them against Neilson 10 heuristics and extract the usability issues in apps. The user testing is then performed by novice users which includes tasks (translated from extracted problems by heuristic evaluation). After completion on whole testing users filled the post-test SUS’s questionnaire. The result shows that the overall success rate of the tasks was 83%, SUS score was 77 and overall relative time-based efficiency very 54.2%. The expert evaluators found 83% minor errors and 17% major errors. The finding of this paper shows  usability problems and recommendations are provided to increase the usability of mobile banking applications at the end of this paper.