December, 2002 – RBC Royal Bank's Online Banking Initiatives: Usable design now and in the future

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Welcome. My name is Eric Schaffer and I am CEO of Human Factors International. And I am here to share with you a case problem that I think you're going to be really interested in. It's a case problem from the Royal Bank of Canada on Project Blue Print and it's a major development project that follows the user-centered design process and it's all the way through. It's on the screen and we have the usability report results and lessons learnt and a lot of insights that I think we'll enjoy. I'd like to introduce two of the key players on that project. Carolyn Burke is the Senior Manager of e-commerce strategy at the Royal and she really played the role that I would think would be executive champion on the project. And Nicole Poirier was the manager of site effectiveness and both of these folks have an incredible understanding of what it takes to make a bank work on the net. And a lot of experience there and they are great fun to work with on the project.

Carolyn Burke: Thanks Eric, but I am not sure that we appreciate being on as a case problem (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: A prime example in a positive way. So what we're going to do is I am going to spend some time chatting with Carolyn and Nicole, ask them some questions. As we go through I'd like you to notice that there's the ability to submit questions from your side. Please do and at the end we'll take those questions and then we'll be answering them. Also during the process we'll have a couple of places where we have the ability for you to sort of go on different kinds of questions. It's a new technology for us, it might work. And our marketing is very happy to try this new method. In any case, what one of the things that makes me very much excited about talking about the Royal is of the larger picture. The Royal Bank did a usability project, project Blue Print that they were talking about, but they also have been really moving ahead in terms of the institutionalization of usability. They're really making usability a normal and routine part of the process and that's something that I am very excited about and I think it is very important. I've got a book that's coming out middle of 2003 and we'll have a few quotes from you, I don't know. And that's important because what is happening in the usability industry is I think we're moving from the days when people just tried one project and okay, let's see if it works, okay, that was really important, that worked, that's great. Should we do another one to the idea that usability can really be a part of what we do day to day and a routine part of every project. I kind of think that if it is worth building, it is worth making it usable. Okay, so you see here a chart, by the way, in front of you. And that chart is from the upcoming book and nobody does it like that chart. What the chart is about is synthesis of a lot of different kinds of approaches that company is doing and a lot of companies pick various path ways to it. And so we will see the way that we will approach that. Okay. So, what we're going to do, we're going to be talking, really about two threads the institutionalization and the project Blue Print. In terms of institutionalization classically, companies start doing serious institutionalization because they have a wake up call at some point. And I'm not sure what was the wake up call for Royal Bank in the sense I know that I've been working on and off at the Royal through 8, 9 years and I guess it wasn't one critical disaster or something that made people start thinking and was it more of an evolution.

Carolyn Burke: It wasn't broken, but we still wanted to fix it. Basically, we've become like the couple that had so many things in our households that we didn't know where to put anything else. And because we've been developing fast and furiously for about 2 years, we actually began to run out of places to put buttons, basically. And we felt that we could do a better job of showing clients what they could use in our site.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And so as I remember we had there was one button services on this side and it was sort of like everything went there, because we couldn't find anywhere else for it.

Nicole Poirier: Oh may be yeah. That was the one. The other problem was there was no consistency as well. You could open up a mutual fund on the mutual fund section, and to open up a GIP or what Americans call a CD you actually went to services. So there wasn't even that type of consistently yet. It was locked (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So that what happened was in terms of the project going forward, Project Blue Print started because the existing navigation container was well done, but started to come apart as the functionality improved and the strategy …

Carolyn Burke: We'd out grown it definitely.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Okay, very good. One of the things that I remember in the project when you started, you started to just do the personal banking side and then I remember going oh should we do the small bank, the small business side as well at the same time. Do you remember the considerations and things we thought about and whether that was a good thing to take on both the personal and the small business?

Carolyn Burke: Eric saw business customers think like consumers and often bank with us as consumers do. So they come out of (inaudible) but their needs are slightly different. You know and as we were refining the personal container, we realized that we were really paying businesses short (inaudible) by not providing them with the same kind of personalized menu we were actually creating for personal customers.

Nicole Poirier: The business project it needed to go through the same usability experience as the personal project did, but it also had a whole component of new functionality for those users. They were getting short changed and because they were all consumer customers as well they knew they were getting short changed. So that project was a little bit bigger but it followed the same usability process as the personal customers did and then there were specific components to give them some new features as well.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And to summarize that led us to gain some efficiencies on the project as we were going through parallel processes some of them using scale.

Carolyn Burke: Yes, definitely.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: That's good, very good. You know, people see in the chart with the hungry rat, they recognize it as the Columbian Obstruction Device. Columbian Obstruction Device was developed about 30 years ago at Columbia University. And it's one of my favorite examples. You got tired of hearing about yeah (laughter). But the idea …

Carolyn Burke: (Inaudible) when we saw it the first time.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Because what the studies were about is if you have a hungry rat and an electric grid and a piece of cheese, if you reduce the amount of shock enough, the rat will go and get the cheese. And so we were very busy reducing the shocking in a way. And we were doing that very systematically to make the banking experience easier. And banking is in some ways not people's favorite thing. (Inaudible) I could imagine doing a study where you say okay what would you prefer doing today you can have a you can balance your check book or you can get a surgery. I have people going well, I don't know (laughter). Does the insurance cover the surgery? But as you thought about doing usability work and (inaudible) best could involve what caused you to go ahead and actually take the step of doing a formal usability project where may be (inaudible) just allow something that would be good and do the best they can to (inaudible).

Carolyn Burke: Nobody was finding the cheese and it is the bottom line. We've really developed a large number of excellent applications. The transactions, they were quite excellent, but the fact there was one female at the call center saying I'd love to be able to change my address or I'd love to be able to order checks told us that they weren't finding the cheese.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So you had, you can order checks that people call that I just wish we could order checks. So you liked your button to say if the user can't find it the function's not there.

Carolyn Burke: Yes.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Fair enough. So that was (inaudible).

Carolyn Burke: We learnt that very quickly (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So the key thing in the site redesign was getting the navigational structure to work better, which is 80% of usability in my opinion. Tell them you know one of the other things you were doing is spreading the gospel of usability within the Royal …

Carolyn Burke: I thought you said gossip about usability (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: You gossiped about (inaudible).

Nicole Poirier: We did.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Laughter) But as you were doing that what was the message you were trying to get out about usability?

Carolyn Burke: I think the fact that we were redesigning our container took us down a fairly dangerous road with many of the bankers and executives that we worked with, redesign conjures up notions of branding, look.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Just make the colors different...

Nicole Poirier: Yeah, make it pretty.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Make it buzz...

Carolyn Burke: And that absolutely wasn't what we were trying to do. We didn't want anything to buzz either (laughter). What we were trying to do was respect our customers and respect how they used us and what they wanted to do. Because if we worked with our customers and not against them, we believed that we'd make more money, save more money, and help happy our customer. So it absolutely wasn't about how pretty the site was, how they liked it.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: How many times did you say make more money, save more money, and have happier customers?

Nicole Poirier: Everyday in a month, like yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And that's really something that I think I'd like to show the people. Let's go ahead and do our first survey here. And ….

Carolyn Burke: Keep our fingers crossed...

Dr. Eric Schaffer: But I'm wondering how many people have the executive champion in the organization who doesn't walk around just saying ah usability is important, because that doesn't work this well as saying in our organization usability is about making money, saving money, happy our customer. Because it's different in different organizations. I mean, if you go to a governmental organization, they don't get to make any money. It mainly saves the money and mostly they get people to vote for. You literally have different kinds of requirements. There are some cases where really you want lots of people to come in to the site because that makes your value higher. So whatever it is, I'm wondering how many people listening to the broadcast are actually able to say we have an executive who can go around, identify what matters in the organization. How usability can make a difference. And so let's see if we can go ahead and see the technology is breaking down the divides in the background and making little hand signals look great, typing frantically (laughter). But really you know when I look at a usability effort, I think that getting an executive champion where getting not just one person, but the executives on board is the key difference between an institutionalization effort, the usability effort which is going to succeed and one which will kind of get through may be the work will get done, but it won't really become more part of the organization and it won't really exist long term.

Carolyn Burke: I think that's absolutely true. One of reasons it is true is good usability takes hard conversations back at the ranch.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: What were the hard conversations?

Carolyn Burke: (Laughter) it is much easier organizationally to let each project manager be master of their own faith and create their own projects. However they may wish to do that. It doesn't help the customer, but it certainly makes the project manager happier having people discuss things, come up with what we think is the best way. It's hard work isn't it, Nicole?

Nicole Poirier: And I mean I really think that if someone is there who is a project manager, which is a great skill, or a banker which is a great skill, or there is someone who has those combined skills but they are no longer a customer. And so you really need to get that feedback from the other side, the person who actually uses it and to really start re-evaluating yourself (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And so it's very easy for somebody in the organization without the influence of an executive to say look what we have to do these kinds of things. We have to be consistent. We have to listen to users to have a great deal of fun taking pictures that they like.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah, oh yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Okay. I knew it, see the technology. So we're going to move along and (inaudible). One of the questions that I got to hear about a little bit is now you've looked at a number of different vendors and some local vendors and why did you end up using HFI all the way down (inaudible).

Nicole Poirier: And it was a Friday afternoon when I made that first call, it was so funny. I talked to Chris on the phone and anyhow (laughter). I didn't even know you had actually done work for the Royal Bank before. I just found you directly actually is how I found you. One of the, that I can say the reason why I know I picked HFI, you were right there. So you knew I would pick HFI as well. You start talking to a lot of different companies when you're doing a big project like this and you know that there's going to be a lot of labor intensive work, but what you're not really sure about yet is how it's going to get executed. And when you start talking to the different members, someone has a niche in one area or another area or another area, but not only did we want to you know add usability to our site, increased sales, decreased cost, and increased customer satisfaction because really changing ROI was not something that we were really looking at before. We had an ATM in our homes, now we wanted to actually do something with it. We wanted to build the relationship with it. So there was a strategic component as well to what we designed, and HFI offered us everything that we were looking for from you know starting with what is the bank looking for, what is our strategy going to be, to what do our customers really want and then integrating those two together and adding in the usability of making sure the site works, and then help us for the standards so really everything that we were looking for was there. So that was very helpful.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So is that going to different companies and trying to piece it together?

Nicole Poirier: And we didn't even, I don't think that we found five different companies that would do those different things with us, really there was you know one company that specialized in one thing and one company that specialized in two, it just didn't work like that. This was a really good mix for us.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: That was good (inaudible) (laughter).

Nicole Poirier: And I really didn't find your web site and did not know what you had done.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible) Martin's right down the hall (inaudible) work with me.

Nicole Poirier: (Inaudible) all kind of Friday afternoon I was playing golf (laughter) but on Monday morning I said we have a conference call on Wednesday with this guys and he was like I told you to study about this man. He interviewed (inaudible) (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible)

Nicole Poirier: Yes, and then we had a half an hour conference call, then (inaudible) then you met us all, and there you go. The rest is history (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible) One of the things that I was actually doing during this project is writing the HFI methodology. We've been doing that process of refining our user centered design process for 20 years and I was very busy talking about it and going through the charts (inaudible) but suddenly I got a chance to actually sit down and write it. And someone said you guys certainly helped me a lot. Carolyn she had several folks in here, (laughter) but do you remember what it was like trying to work through this process without an overall road map, without having to know who (inaudible) methodology that I could hand you and say this is what we're doing.

Nicole Poirier: You didn't have any details of that, but we did have kind of even just the work flow that was presented at every meeting and this was what we were going to like second time I saw (inaudible) they keep repeating that. But then the third time like oh look we're moving. We're actually going somewhere. So that was helpful as well. So there was a component that was there, but it really helped us to understand you know, know what your user wants, talk to them about what you want to make sure everything interacts and then bring it all together. It wasn't that difficult to do it with (inaudible) but I think that every time I look at this and Carolyn has it pinned up on my board and she's making me smile everyday (laughter) yeah, when I stop by to see her note. But no, it's definitely very well defined in the Schaffer method (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible)

Nicole Poirier: Yeah, know definitely.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Very good. When you started, (inaudible) the project Blue Print a little bit, we started with a process of doing expert review. Do you remember what it was like having your sites with you?

Nicole Poirier: Making babies cry I think (laughter). It made me cry to but I just (inaudible) (laughter). It's very painful when you speak things that you put so much sweat and tears into you know be just destroyed. And so I highly recommend all let's go to testing early when you're not attached to what you're building. So that way you kind of hear what's going on and you say oh look, I never thought of it that way. Whereas when they do it at the end, it just hurts you (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: We really do like doing the projects earlier on.

Nicole Poirier: Oh yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: This is the part we can say that we are nice about it somewhere.

Nicole Poirier: You (inaudible) about it sometimes (laughter). Other times he was like did you not notice? No, actually we didn't think about.

Carolyn Burke: One of the most valuable parts of getting your site reviewed was probably identifying the prime users of the site. And I think that previously we had not done that with enough deliberation. You know, you can please a couple of people. You probably can't please every single person who comes to your web site. So that in itself was a good exercise.

Nicole Poirier: The other thing that's very difficult and I think a lot of people need to go through expert reviews these days is because so many web sites have been built in chunks. Like no one started with this grandeurs plan of we're going to go about banking and it's going to have 32 features. Everyone started chunk by chunk by chunk by chunk and tried to make improvements later in the game. So doing that site review is now I think is very helpful for a lot of companies where kind of all of that (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah, it's hard because, it's hard to do a review (laughter) ((inaudible) sometimes, but part of what's happening is people they are going to work within the trenches within this one little line of business (inaudible) and unless there has been a process which brings that high level coordination, and then unless there has been a process where the marketing strategy is really instantiated throughout the development, then you go in and sort of like you know the main user is this kind of user may want to sign up but there's no place that says that you can do it (laughter). Well.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: It's important to start by saying okay. What is it that we've got now and where do we need to go. We've got a long (inaudible) so. Let's talk about the ongoing process. If you remember the first major step, we had a sort of three step process. We talked about it as user interface structure (inaudible) and that was probably the most key part of project Blue Print. And it started like you know hey I'm going to come in, I'm going to understand what the organization wants, and come out at the end of the day with a sketch that says this is what the organization's vision looks like. Do you remember what that was like and what the issues were?

Nicole Poirier: Well, it was I mean it was very interesting because the sketch, it was (inaudible) an artist. And then a lot of times other people got to be an artist as well. So that was very interesting to see all of these executives take part in Eric's little drawing session. So that was very interesting. And then if there are about, I don't know, may be 8 sessions, all of a sudden it started coming up like everyday you come in and it would be on a computer and it would look a little different and look a little different. And then we sat down with the technology team. So that was interesting as well. (Laughter). Then we started realizing it is online banking, it is through a secure server. There is a lot of you know host of applications in the back ground so all of a sudden you start realizing okay, well let's not do this one but okay we can do this one, or let's you know may be put this one aside for this year and we'll work on that one later. So that was very interesting as well.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Getting the technology people in, you do want to see sweat on the top (inaudible) (laughter) not actually (inaudible) down the floor.

Nicole Poirier: That's rights, exactly. So we had some very interesting conversations that were not very helpful as well as (inaudible) helped the sketch along.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And the Royal technology people are really sharp. I mean they had a, it was interesting how we talk about things like okay we had to (inaudible) all the day and get to one place. We got yeah, when we do that, (inaudible) for 2 years (laughter) you know so much time, it was a lot of that wasn't it?

Nicole Poirier: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Funny.

Nicole Poirier: So yes, it was very and as soon as he would show a picture too it's like well, we do that, that means and right away you know they already understood exactly what was going to be the background challenge. So that was very interesting. And then really, you know, taking that sketch one step further and bringing it to the customer (inaudible) about …

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah, you know, we definitely did that. Carolyn, but let me ask you from the executive management point of view, did getting the stake holders into the process and actually drawing the screens with them and getting some concepts out, did that help get people on board with the process?

Carolyn Burke: Oh for sure. I think it became MOT (inaudible) on itself as we went through. It's a little bit like saying you're going to build a building and we all have an idea and I had about what that building looks like. But as you go forward and make a sketch of the building, people go down each other's ideas, and what emerges is a fringe product that actually looks quite good, that probably nobody had had a concrete view of in their minds when we embarked on the process. By the end I really do feel like everybody was on board and had got into the building. We created it together and it was an amazing thing to be able to see that at the end.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: I was just pooling the best ideas and some times you go in and people would have you know these kind of wild ideas. It is sort of, local ideas like okay what we want the home page like the three quarters of it would be Visa, APR, and Affinity Cards or something. And then and we kind of (inaudible) and we go on, but just pooling the really good ideas.

Carolyn Burke: Right.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Gave us something like I think that was far better than we could have gotten just you know (inaudible). Then, okay, so the first step was you go out, you get the staples, you do this beautiful picture and I think everybody would say kind of okay now you can code it. That'll be good. It really looks, it's great, it's more than we, and then all of a sudden HFI goes no we have to go out and I'd like to show it to the users and Carolyn heard that and went and I think I remember you kind of go how am I going to sell that to people (laughter). This already looks pretty good. May be (inaudible).

Carolyn Burke: They loved the building (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So, you know so then Carolyn said (inaudible) it was like okay this is what the bank wants. Now I have to know what the customers want.

Carolyn Burke: That's right.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: What do you remember of that process of going out and talking to customers and going through that data gathering process?

Carolyn Burke: I remember mostly being behind the glass as we would have users go through it. And have people be very frustrated that the greatest best idea was not something that was working out.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So people would be behind the glass.

Carolyn Burke: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: You were going okay this is my idea. This should be called what a virtual …

Carolyn Burke: Banker.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Virtual banker. This is oh virtual banker is going to be really good. This is hot. And then you know it's like one customer after another virtual banker no (laughter).

Carolyn Burke: (Inaudible)

Carolyn Burke: But it was democratic. Because all of us had ideas that were shot down.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Including you.

Carolyn Burke: Yes, including me.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: But it's good. It's helping. And I think one of the things was that you really got to see how even if you bring everybody's brilliant ideas together and just go forward with it, it doesn't work because the view of the world that's inside the bank is different from the view outside.

Carolyn Burke: What it did was allow us to share our common goal with our client. So we wanted to do more business and so did our clients. And at the end of the day, if a feature we absolutely loved didn't work in terms of bringing more business to us and allowing the clients to do more business, we all understood that was the objective. So we did good in common learning, common base of understanding of how we should be able to …

Dr. Eric Schaffer: That's very good. One of the things that we were doing a lot in the process was actually taking numeric measurements and gathering data on task performance and things like that. It's an exercise usability people kind of by reflex do, but from a business point of view, did it help to identify where the gaps were. What do you think?

Nicole Poirier: Where the gaps were (inaudible)

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah, where problems were like we had (inaudible)

Nicole Poirier: There was a (laughter) I mean there were lot of things that one of the things actually that Carolyn and I was strong about going anyways and to this day still kind of fight toward is call everything what it is. And that's the thing (inaudible) and we try and work for that because it's very difficult in a branding world, in a marketing world, and in the usability world to really try to build the right scenario. Everyone wants to brand something yet nothing is (inaudible) any more. So unfortunately, (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And so let me (inaudible) for people because I think it's a fantastic lesson learnt that a lot of times a marketing organization will say this is what we want the brand to be in order to see it's you know (inaudible) Visa Card and that has tremendous meaning for the person that came up with that. True. And then you put that as a link and people go what, and never mind, go on.

Nicole Poirier: And try using it for something else and it's not what they wanted and don't learn anything from that either. So that was very interesting. So things that – we had one particular product that we hadn't launched yet that we actually just called the name of the product and no one was like going to that at all at all at all. And actually now it's had a great success rate, because we've called it what it is. We said add accounts from other financial institutions (inaudible)

Dr. Eric Schaffer: That was what it did.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah, adding definitely your bank accounts aggregating your accounts from other financial institutions.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: That one is fascinating for me because what we do, we try using different words, the first, you know it's technically called aggregation where you can take accounts from other institutions and put it in so you see one collective and when we explained it to people, to my surprise, customers said yes that's good. I want that (inaudible) (laughter). Remember I was playing the game (inaudible) how much would you pay? One (inaudible) (laughter) but it was great but then people didn't really understand the word (inaudible). I don't know how many aggregations we went through where we changed it and they still didn't get it, (inaudible) change it.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah. And then the trade mark name as well. The aggregation's kind of a scary name and then you had the trade mark name. That didn't help either. So it was very, that went on for a long time (laughter). Actually I think it went on to the last step of usability testing so it just went find the perfect thing. Where sometimes you can kind of come out with okay that didn't work but that worked enough, let's tweak it a little and let's keep going. Another times it's like no we have to try that again, you know.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah, one of the things that we often do in a test is and I remember doing it, it was like you get down with the first place like okay tonight we change the prototype (laughter). One of the things that we were also doing was testing the brand perception. And we had a number of different versions of the site that were reflecting slightly different graphic treatments. They were, the identical screens had different graphic treatments and we had people looking at a list of terms and saying which one was the most you know respectable or which one was the most clear looking. Do you remember that process?

Nicole Poirier: (Inaudible) (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible)

Nicole Poirier: Just (inaudible) to confuse me. Actually, that was a very interesting process as well because the first time Eric showed to me I said they were all the same. Why are we having this conversation? Can we make them very, very different? And he's like, trust me. They're going to (inaudible). And that's exactly what happened is we put the four of them up on a wall and we moved them around so that it wasn't (inaudible) and people really had serious comments back on what was progressive and what was conservative and what was professional and what was child like and it was amazing that there was a consistency and it wasn't clear (inaudible) between you know the 10 things that we gave them. It's a really good way to compare concepts and I wish you had that flight actually. But basically there's you pick your branch topics, the ones that we wanted to see, where we wanted to be, what we wanted and what we didn't want from a site. And then we had four different pictures associated with those words. And so people actually rank them and then we were able to see the clear winner of where the site should be going. It was actually very interesting to have, and again for something that at first view I thought were four very similar pictures. Like that no one would have any difference with and they all had a (inaudible).

Carolyn Burke: All four had distinctly the attributes of a bank (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: One more thing, because we didn't want anything, lot of times what will happen is people will say okay, well, we're going to really brand this and then they would this is not a bank anymore. It looks like something wired magazine or something. (Inaudible) another I've seen thumbs up from all the text. They looked very confident. We'll try this again. So we've another survey question for you. How do you select the best graphic work? Do you do your user testing like we just described where you can say okay I have several versions here. This one has the closest fit to our brand values. Do you show them to executives and executive goes that one. Or some of the executives make it on that sort or some other method like go ahead and pick the one which your organization uses. Let's say if you can get some data on that. It's funny, you know it's funny. I've seen lot of agencies in their process and it really is boils down to the they take a group of very creative people and they go and show them and they come up with a really good idea. And then they come up with two bad ideas and then they're not (inaudible) and they bring it in and they show it to the executive. And they're praying like pick the good idea. And then the executive picks whatever I do the executive picks as that's going on. And the problem is that some I know that there's a lot of times when I look at graphics and say that's the one. That's the one, it's really good.

Nicole Poirier: I think we did that. And I think (inaudible) (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: In fact, I can't ever remember we were lying (laughter). (Inaudible) that's really bad, (inaudible).

Carolyn Burke: It worked I heard. (inaudible) (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Really worked? Okay. But we had the building is working so (inaudible) nodding heads and they're going to go on and they're going to (inaudible) okay. Do you remember the whole process of working on the personal side and the small business side and working on trying to get those compatible about handling the different (inaudible) what do you remember that process?

Nicole Poirier: There were a couple of things. It wasn't horribly difficult but the great thing that Carolyn and I are so happy about is actually that we were able to customize (inaudible). So financing products and lending products are you know the same type of products but for two different markets. And we were actually able to customize those names once the sites were built because they aren't separate containers. So that was very, very, very helpful. Some things like businesses think in assets and liability view we offer them different products. There are certain things that they care about that personal customers don't (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah. Personal customer going assets and liabilities.

Nicole Poirier: Yes, all the bankers love the assets and liabilities (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Oh I know the bankers do.

Nicole Poirier: No one else (inaudible) (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible).

Nicole Poirier: No one else ever uses it. But the bankers all use it. They love it. So that was great. So we were actually able to give the business customers the assets liability view and the personal customers their regular view. So that was a very interesting one as well. And what they called things was you know like the names of the products were okay to be the same, but it was really what they were looking for out of their business. So we were really able to customize that as we grew in size as well.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So you can make it work (inaudible).

Nicole Poirier: Yes.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: The site was extensive (inaudible) you do that to add functionality and then it had a commonality so (inaudible) it was like you had the same company's (inaudible)

Nicole Poirier: That's right, yeah. And what we did learn because we did touch the different navigation and I specifically remember the right hand navigation versus left hand navigation conversation. And you know, it didn't matter whether you were personal or business, it was all, at one point it was the business customers would want it on the left and the personal customers would want it on the right. And you know what, it really didn't make a difference. So it was very interesting.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: One of the things, as we got the container solid, and came back and started talking about the idea of a template-based standard, a standard that we would as we designed the screens within the container that would give us consistency of screen layout and design, can you recount little bit the experience of doing that standard?

Nicole Poirier: Oh like it was yesterday. It was actually the memorable day was a year ago today. Yes, it was. The things I understand is once you finish the user document, you know exactly what you are building toward, but you still don't actually know how you are building it. And we still had at the time 8 project managers in the business world that talked to the consumers, and talked to the marketing department, and everyone else. And then we still had almost 40 people building on our technical team. And we were still going to be building project by project once this project was done. So and we couldn't stop the world from moving, right. So people were building projects as we were redesigning online banking. And we said we're not going to be able to achieve this and continue its growth. We're just going to end up being broken again. And we realized that before we started building. So that was so happy we realized that then. So we took a little break. We said let's not build yet. We have our user document. We know what we're building toward. The technical team had something to work for now because they could actually start looking at technologies and then it took us, we did 6 weeks, 8 weeks at the most.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Six weeks.

Nicole Poirier: We did in 6. I think we might have delayed you because we asked for a couple of extra days to …

Carolyn Burke: To review.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah, executive reviews over here. But it was about a 6-week process. And we engaged HFI to do this and it was funny because I actually gave this presentation about how to build a standard. And I was saying, yes I was saying you can do it yourself, you can engage a facilitator, or you can engage a company that already has a standard that you can then customize. And at least engage a facilitator but if you can engage a company that already has a standard that you know works, saves you time, saves you hassle, and it was like definitely the best decision for us. So we had a team of 10 very local people and it was the maximum number of people you were allowed to have. And we were across RBC Banking, which was very important to us. We wanted to make sure we had people from all over. So we had marketing, and we had e-marketing, and we had online banking, and we had a call center up involved, and our technology teams involved. And we actually had we talked about what type of pages, we built the template pages. And what type of pages do we have. And then how do we actually customize those pages to make sure that if ever someone wants to have a menu that they know exactly what it should look like. Or if ever they want to have an input page, they know exactly what it looks like. And because we started the reasoning you can so this in 6 weeks is really because we started with standard templates that we know that have been tried, tested, and proved through HFI and then we customized them to our company. And then there was a lot of branding conversation obviously. And those conversations continue today and the standards still get tweaked. But that was really, really helpful. And basically what we got at the end of that is a document that you have now all of the components of how your pages are built as well as actual page types. So when we went to then our next step and once we were done with this document December 18th last year, the technical team and myself and mostly one of the technical people, Anna, sat down and went through every single one of our 300 pages in online banking and assigned a page type to it. And then what they did is they built a shelf for the technical team and so every time that they would re-designing a page, they would grab the shelf that matched that, just as I looked at the template, they looked at the shelf because they were looking at the background side of it. And then they would code everything to those shelves. And so it was phenomenal, like that was amazing. Because then you didn't have to have conversations over and over again about where the buttons go, what are buttons called, what colors are the buttons, how far apart is you know this from this, if I want to say something is important information what should it look like, what draws the customer's attention to that, and how does the customer know between the different parts of online banking when something is important information or something is a legal notice. So we really were able to standardize that. It still gets people's creativity because really the task flow of doing a transaction is still getting created every time when you do a new project.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: That you don't have to rename that whether it's find or search or query or what is that.

Nicole Poirier: Exactly and they are not get or fetch (laughter) (inaudible) but that was very, very good, like that was I mean it was an intense 6-weeks and it was really funny, because having the facilitator there who was from HFI was very helpful. And when we would make decisions he'd go you know, I don't know. And he'd warn us three times. And after three times he said okay you lose we win, let's go and we haven't you know I think there was (inaudible) that we didn't agree. Amongst ourselves, there was a lot a little bit more (laughter) conversation going on. But it was really, it was an excellent exercise and we use it all the time. As a matter of fact, I actually have it. I have it printed right now, the standards and I've rented it out to someone (inaudible) (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: What did you …

Nicole Poirier: It works for everything. It works for intranet site, it works for internet site, it works for online banking, yeah we used it as a standard template of usable pages, we use it for everything.

Carolyn Burke: It works best when people like me (inaudible) opinion (laughter). We express them and then we quickly find out it was discussed in the standards committee (inaudible). So very good.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Absolutely. Do you have any sense for the impact of a standard on development time or …

Nicole Poirier: You know, I think that we at that time it was about 10%. And I think when it comes to developing the pages, that is probably increased. We're working through a couple of our things right now just on our task flows. And once we have that, it's definitely going to be above the 10% (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Great, so it works (inaudible).

Nicole Poirier: And just the look of it is you know there used to be (inaudible) yeah. We have questions (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Okay, oh goodness, okay. (Laughter) so we have the last poll results and what we found was that on the graphic look, 51% use user testing, 34% user executive decision, and hope for the best, and 15% said other. Few of the people who had said other sent in just used the submit question and share what those others are. That's a 15% is a lot.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: But of the 34% that just rely on executive decisions, I think about some new methods. We have another survey question and that is obviously working, so that's a good sign. And the question is whether your organization has a template-based standard like the one we've been talking about. A template-based standard meaning one where a process of doing design is to go in and pick the right standard page type and although going through that may be one thing. That would take the person long days, but and pick the right standard page type and then follow the conventions …

Nicole Poirier: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Of that page type. It's funny …

Nicole Poirier: One day I'll show you the excel spreadsheet.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: I want to see that (laughter). Oh my gosh! But one thing about template-based standards is when we say about standards, it's a little bit like the standards in Jazz. You need that framework, you need the (inaudible), but you also want the creativity like the artistic license to work well within it. To think of what the customer really needs, to be creative about cutting down the number of steps and all things.

Nicole Poirier: That's right. And I think that goes a lot back to building that task flow as well as going through it. So …

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Very good.

Nicole Poirier: Yes.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Okay. Then as you were going through and doing detailed design on the screen, one of the things I remember you know we now have the container, we now have the standard, and you were worried about the ability of your organization. You've gotten some training and now you've got a pretty good sort of thing to go ahead and pull a thread over the screen. How did that go? Did that work at all?

Nicole Poirier:  It worked pretty well what we did and I mean there are tons of different ways to do this. But what we would do is we would about every 2 weeks I guess kind of bring together all of our questions, send them over in a power point, and then I would discuss it with (inaudible) someone at HFI. But you don't have to use HFI to do that, but it was just they had built our standard and we had that ongoing relationship. So we would and we were still learning the standard a little bit. What we didn't do or we didn't do our design at all. What we did that all ourselves. We have our internal team. We worked the best with it as we could and remembering that we were redesigning, so it wasn't all from scratch either. But about every 2 weeks we would spend you know a good couple of hours talking about what about this scenario, what about that scenario, what if I was starting from scratch which I'm not but okay now what can I do to kind of fix what I have.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So you had a little bit of ongoing (inaudible) help from HFI.

Nicole Poirier: We did, yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: But basically you took it on your own. You were pretty successful.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah no, we were, you know we one page actually became the wildcard page.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: The wildcard page.

Nicole Poirier: Yes, we didn't …

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Is that any page type I don't know about?

Nicole Poirier: Well it actually is one of the page types that we just kind of renamed (laughter) because we do have certain scenarios where we just tell people legal opinions or we just sort of little short alerts. So it's not quite a document but it's still. So we thought of the wildcard. So that was one we created ourselves.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Very good.

Nicole Poirier: (Laughter) it was our Jazz playing (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: I think it's good (inaudible).

Nicole Poirier: But other than that we worked on a lot of it on our own. And I think we did okay.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: I have another client that created the ugly page. The wildcard sounds much better. (Laughter) so the site's up now.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: What's the new experience?

Nicole Poirier: Crazy (laughter).

Carolyn Burke: Well, they found the cheese.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: They found the cheese. This sounds very good.

Carolyn Burke: Yeah, which was really one of our main drivers going in and our uptake in the various transactions (inaudible) has been excellent, double, triple digit in less than a year. But I think our clients are also much more satisfied with the site. We had a number of comments coming in to the call center where they were surprised at how much they can do now.

Nicole Poirier: How much stuff we've added.

Carolyn Burke: They actually believe we've developed it (inaudible) (laughter).

Nicole Poirier: Oh yeah. And actually the only thing that we did (inaudible) was financial closing (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And they were saying oh gosh you really updated the site.

Nicole Poirier: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible) because they could actually get to that.

Nicole Poirier: Actually it was funny when we were testing the French site. I had a customer go look for and this was one that we had a lot of conversations about as well, government remittances for businesses. And so it was what do you call this and you know it's not tax filing and we had so many conversations. So when we were testing the French site I wrote to a customer to ask him to enroll, because we hadn't had anyone enrolling in French. And I started to tell him how to how to get there. And then I stopped. And I was like come on you find out (laughter). And he wrote back. He said I found it so easily. I don't know what you were worried about. So I was like (inaudible) business so I had no idea what you know. I had no idea (inaudible) for tax saving, but everything worked. Able to transfer funds (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: One of the things that we talked a little bit about and some people are very worried about in this kind of process is the cost and the process of cutting people over to a new design and like there used to be old design and now they are going to call up and (inaudible) you know. So what was the experience of that? Did you have a lot of difficulty in the calls (inaudible) when you cut it over you kind of expect the lights to come on and (inaudible).

Nicole Poirier: I personally would like to not come on at first. And so it was like where are the calls, where are the calls, where are the calls.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Did you actually cut it over?

Nicole Poirier: (Laughter) Exactly. Did it work? Did we do it faster? So we actually did, we have 2 million customers that bank online with us. And so we did it in small chunks three times a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday over a 8-week, I believe, period for English and French. So we didn't do everyone at once and that was not a problem. So that, the good news is that if you actually want to do something and you don't want it, you know we were afraid what if someone's neighbor gets it and they don't get. That was all fine (inaudible). But just because there were a lot more emails coming in, definitely it was a good thing to do. But it is funny how it does really take you know I don't think that we saw any type of hit until about 500,000 points. And then around a 500,000 marker people started you know writing us more. But then again we did tell them to send us instructions and questions wherefore they sent us instructions and questions (laughter).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: What were the (inaudible) biggest time when the questions people had or problems people had in the cut over doing this site?

Carolyn Burke: There were a couple of things that we had put into an intuitive position. But some folks were deeply attached to the old site. So they were used to going directly there (inaudible) or some of the other things that we had. But that was a small (inaudible). By and large …

Nicole Poirier: Yeah.

Carolyn Burke: They managed to find it.

Nicole Poirier: And it was funny because everyday when I spoke to the call center (inaudible) instructions and questions, we used to have this thing called mail. And we thought people used it (inaudible). When we told them to send us instructions and questions (inaudible) I said what are they writing about? And they were like everything. I'm like what do you mean by everything? And they went about the banking. (Inaudible) (laughter) That was really they now want to you know if I cannot leave my chair, I do not want to leave my (inaudible) and so they're using (inaudible)

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Everything.

Nicole Poirier: Oh yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So you are really handling more through the web channel with this. Okay. So as we look going forward within the Royal Bank Organization can you share a little bit your thoughts for the future and tell them how before we go into see usability become part of the normal process there, what are your thoughts and what do you have to say?

Carolyn Burke: I think we have the different mindset now in terms of incorporating usability early on in the project. Certainly the customer design interface and how the data flows back and forth between the client and the bank is something that's top of the mind. But we also have (inaudible) quality control procedures that we've instituted where certain individuals in my group will work with (inaudible) want to present on the web to make sure it's designed for usability with compliance to the standard and then we do test it before it goes out. Sometimes you know there are still a couple of things that we might you know so we do have a feedback flow to client service and through email. But by and large it's presenting more effective transactions that our customers can feel comfortable with (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: So when you began to set up the standard process where usability is considered early on, you have (inaudible) that.

Carolyn Burke: Yeah.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: You can provide consultative support.

Nicole Poirier: We've also kept the standards committee running and over because it has been a year now that I would say 8 of the 10 people are new to the team. And so I just met with them for the first time a couple of weeks ago and I said remember that you were all picked here to be evangelist about standards regardless if it's directly related to your job or the person next to your job. Whenever you can use it, use it. And I use again all the standards all of the time on one of our internet sites just because it's when you're saying how do you design the site. Well, why I'm going to sit here and rack my brain on how to design the site when I can just figure out what page type it is and move it into that template, right? So it's very important to have people that know about it that (inaudible) talk about everything in the organization as often as you can. The first one that I ever started about hearing usability, I went to the Usability Professionals Association of Toronto and the two people that were speaking worked in a software company I believe and they were talking about how they had you know gotten people in their small company to start understanding usability and to get an executive champion. And they had like I don't know, 75 people in their company. We have 44,000. And so yet we speak across functional events we've made friends across the organization. We really love to talk of each other as well as more people get involved in usability and usability testing and we share with our (inaudible). We have to keep it alive. We have to have the executives understand why we do it as well as it's really important to not let it just die.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Very good. Keep the effort rolling ahead.

Nicole Poirier: Oh yeah.

Carolyn Burke: I think it improves the employee satisfaction as well. We have fewer arguments with our resolution because we share the same bases and we share the same goal for the customer. We do actually get (inaudible) quicker.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And so with a common framework get the customer to have the right experience with the customer's performance then very visibly is the true answer to it. We have another one. Does your organization have the type of template based design standards we've been talking about? 22% said yes, 78% said no. One of the missing add on line (laughter) (inaudible). Okay so oh (inaudible) here's the full question.

Carolyn Burke: Okay.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Okay so …

Carolyn Burke: I want to share (inaudible)

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah, this is, okay. How many people having executive champion in the organization that understands the real importance of usability work? And so we're going to take that poll again and I apologize for the technical side that I told you about (laughter). Okay. So as we are doing that poll I'm going to share some questions that are coming in from the audience we've got. Have you considered adding any collaborative tools to provide live help over the net to your online banking customers? Things like chat and you know phone help and things like that.

Carolyn Burke: We have I mean introduced a collaborative tool with this version of the container that was adding the phone number that we picked (laughter) and made an effective start.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: That's a very good start.

Carolyn Burke: It's quite basic, but it's very handy. I won't say that our volume of phone calls have gone up, but our client satisfaction is quite high because should they need it, it is there. The email is also in a much more visible place and the input screen say you're clearing an amount or something that you actually see on the screen, the input screen can appear on the same screen. So there's no need to write a number down and then retransmit it. So we're going to be experimenting with what we've just introduced over the next year or so. We have an (inaudible) on the other tools, but I'm always conscious about customer behavior is not easy to change. And I would prefer to work with a method a customer's very comfortable with than try introducing technology for a basic need.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Sometimes I've seen facilities which I don't know if you've seen the phone, facility was like we'll call you, okay. To call me I have to type in my phone number, okay so I type that. Now I have to wait. You know it is like just the 800 number. Keep it simple. Okay. Did you use any other usability methods aside from those from HFI?

Nicole Poirier: We don't, we do our usability testing now locally in Toronto. So we do use an outside company to do that, we being a large organization have areas of expertise. So one group that we had largely embrace usability right in the beginning was our strategic market research group. And they are now usability advocates, more than one of them. It is quite exciting, yes. It is very interesting. And so what we do is whenever we wanted to do usability testing, we don't actually do it in house. We do engage locally to do that with us. So that's one thing. Method of usability, you know we attend a lot, we share a lot within the company. And I wouldn't say that we didn't build, we have never built something, we've never built a usability template that wasn't one of HFI's. So but we have used definitely other methods or standards. We use other company to build certain standards. Never in a holistic view like this never with usability as the key focus.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Ooh wow, oh my goodness! Oh, okay. (Laughter) Oh my gosh! I'm glad you got that …

Nicole Poirier: (Inaudible)

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Do you have an executive champion in your organization understand the real importance of usability work, 3% said yes, 97% said no. You're aware of (inaudible) the bidding will start (laughter).

Nicole Poirier: Anywhere south.

Carolyn Burke: Yeah.

Nicole Poirier: Something that I do have to say that's really important other than the fact that Carolyn does do speaker sessions anywhere except North Carolina (inaudible) (laughter) that's right. Something that's really important is you know make money, save money, and increase customer satisfaction is probably one of the easiest ways to get your executive's attention if you don't already have it. And Carolyn you know look at her. She is the converted and don't you agree? She is definitely the converted and that will catch any executive's eye. So when you say you know it will increase ROI, I think that they're right there and there are not just things that you've written but I mean in our entire business case there are tons of research companies out there. If you just go on the web and start typing in usability or usability and you know return on investment, you will find stuff. And you can really start showing the business cases that say this is worth investing in.

Carolyn Burke: You know I would just say as a word of advice that the connection is really simple and when you use large words that many people don't understand and you make the connection obscure, you're not doing yourself a favor. So talking about heuristic evaluations and various things that you could do (inaudible) the connections to making money and keeping (inaudible) (laughter) could tend to get a little bit hard to reach. So you, it's a fairly simple thing that we've done here and I think that's the secret of it. It was a lot of work but it was simple.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah, and that was you know inviting the Schaffer method. Carolyn was my mentor and (inaudible) (laughter) speakers. Because we've had this method for years and years, but we've always had it in our own language and I'm just simplifying it (inaudible) sort of it was you know understanding what the organization wants, understanding what the users want. (Inaudible) okay there are a few more questions then we can get away (inaudible) (laughter). What is the best screen resolution to be designing to (minimum) for the financial industry?

Nicole Poirier: I can tell, you know what, okay I will tell you what I did and I do have someone I do have one research firm who doesn't agree with me. I won't name them, but (inaudible) as well. Oh that's right. We did talk to a lot of usability companies, by the way, but we didn't go back to that method one. We didn't use anyone else's method, but we did get some training from other people. But we designed it 800 x 600 and I would not yet change that. I would not go, we used to be at 645 x 480 and I'm very happy that we moved away from that. And I think that was a fine decision to make. But I do still speak to a lot of customers that have the largest font on the 800 x 600. So I wouldn't actually for financial services there's a lot of older people using them now, using online banking. I am not ready to move that up. And something that I highly recommend to everyone is do not force them to one size. Let them use the larger icons. Let them use the larger size fonts. Don't force your templating to actually force them to (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Within your organization, should the usability team reside in IS or Marketing?

Carolyn Burke: IS I'm imagining is technology.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah.

Carolyn Burke: And

Dr. Eric Schaffer: The information system.

Carolyn Burke: And marketing is a business division. I think the real question is should they be in technology or should they be in the business and if they're in technology it's a bit like asking a barber if you need a hair cut. I mean (laughter) at the end of the day having some sort of creative attention between two groups is a good thing. Business has business results they're looking to perform. They have a real direct connection with the client looking to do business with them and they need to meet that goal. Technology performs all of the tasks related to building what the business wants, what the customer wants. But I think you need to have some arguments. It's good to put it in the business.

Nicole Poirier: I think (inaudible) (laughter) the barber thing (inaudible) but and something else as well is that in our organization the business is all of the people who are writing the business cases which is where you really get the benefit of it. However, all of our IT people have definitely I think become advocates if they are not evangelist. I have heard the tech lead himself say you and your usability now I think of it everywhere I go on the elevator, with my chair, (laughter) and so it's really quite funny. But and there are some very healthy conversations that occur. I think that everyone has to be the advocate, but the team itself I would tend to agree needs to sit in that business (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Get old, grey, and better in the usability field walking back (inaudible) (laughter) (inaudible). How did corporate politics effect the process, and what was the deciding factor to redesign?

Carolyn Burke: I think the deciding factor to redesign was the clear connection that we could paint between improved client satisfaction and improved corporate results as a result of the new container. So while we used the Schaffer method for our standard, we did do a really thorough review for our business case followed the research rules that were out there. We did a number of projections. The business case was hard work and I think that corporately it was excellent work just as Eric's drawings put everybody on the same playing field so was the business case. And the level of awareness of usability in the organization went up.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Very good. Users know what they want – (laughter) Users may know what they want ... Do they know what they need?

Carolyn Burke: That's a really good question. Well, I think that's why we don't ask them do you like this or do you like this (laughter). And I'm still not sure I care that much about their preferences, but the research that we did that actually took them through tasks that were very important to them and very important to us showed us what they needed and I think that's the right approach. Because somebody likes something, it's the same in the advertising world or you know the publishing world. It doesn't mean that it will help you (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: You go, you ask people does our privacy policy matter to you. 85% will say absolutely. And 0.01% will actually look at it. The users don't know what they need. They don't. and that's why the process never ever goes in and says users tell us what you need, tell us what – that's not the way to do it. It really takes the process of understanding who the users are and what their task flow is and engineering the task flow you want in the future. So good question. Now, Was the favorite branding the most usable? Oh, that's interesting.

Nicole Poirier: I don't, I think that's an interesting question, because I think what we did is we really took the usability component of it. So we had branding was kind of – was the favorite branding most usable?

Dr. Eric Schaffer: The (inaudible) that we did was we helped consistent usability (inaudible) so all the skills that we were testing had exactly the same (inaudible) exactly the same content, exactly the same layout and so we were really testing the skills as opposed to being quality of layout (inaudible)

Nicole Poirier: Yeah, so we ensured that the site was usable and then we added in all of the different components of our branding terminology attributes that we were looking for branding, you know, yeah.

Carolyn Burke: Two different questions really.

Nicole Poirier: Yes.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: What usability tests were done at the Royal Bank and what was the feedback?

Nicole Poirier: What usability tests were done at the Royal Bank and what was the feedback? (laughter).

Carolyn Burke: We tested all of the very important tasks within our container with our most important users I think at the end of the day so there were a number of (inaudible).

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And there were cycles of tests too. We tested in the Schaffer method their cycles were you do testing which is (inaudible) testing early on where we are iterating we are making changes in the testing later on to see if it's really working. So we did a number of cycles of testing and the feedback was positive. The designs really good.

Nicole Poirier: And the first, I think one of the things that may be we didn't talk a lot about is that we did the first set of testing we really talked to all the customers about their banking relationships and what they were looking for in their banking relationship not just of a bank but in their banking relationship and then how they wanted that on the web. And then we started saying, well, you know, we started giving them different scenarios. And then it was just the paper view. I don't know. There wasn't even a paper, it was the sketch at that time, so there was the sketch. But we did do a card search of all of their financial different types of financial products. So we did a lot of that.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: (Inaudible) lesson learnt (laughter).

Nicole Poirier: So we did a lot of that, we did different card searches, professional customers, and for business customers. So those were the types of exercises we did. We did never get a focus group of usability tests. I don't know if that was the type of questions you're asking. But it was always you know one person with one user. And then we moved that forward to where then finally we actually did have the paper prototype and we had the four different (inaudible) and we had a computer version that was detailed enough. It had 10 pages, 15 pages, on it I would say the detailed version. And then as we started building and we started coming up with different scenarios, that's when we started really studying specific features. And to this day back to where we continue to do our usability tests with all new things is we test the words you know we test the language, we test where people find things, if there's extra information where would they like to see it, how would they like to present it. So we still kind of you know test everything as we go along as well. But we don't do we haven't done any focus groups. We haven't done any online testing at all. It's always been one person with one user.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: How much of the public site was affected or changed as a result of this project?

Nicole Poirier: Well, there were two things there. One is that our public site went over every design last year. And so although it doesn't have this standard applied to it, it did go through the heuristic evaluation. A few babies cried. (Inaudible) but it worked really well. Actually it was great because there was already an agency engaged that was half way through working on this when we met up with HFI and so we had by public site everyone means our public web site Royal Bank.com. And we do have multiple at RBC we have multiple different ones. So I am just speaking about Royal Bank.com right now. So usability was brought in to a project that was already half way through. So we did a lot of usability testing on that project as well after we did the heuristic evaluation and we took the heuristic evaluation into account. And then now I think over the next 12 to 18 months you will actually finally see the actual standard applied to it. And you actually see possibly some tweaks and it will be a little bit more not just (inaudible) which has been the whole thing.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Very good. Okay. Last thing is the question about will the WebCast be available after the broadcast? And humanfactors.com within the next week will have the web cast available in our archives of web casts. We also will have it available soon on CD so you can get it and stick it in your pocket for whatever reasons (inaudible) (laughter). So in any case this was for me a wonderful project. It was very exciting to see project Blue Print really open up a whole new level of usability engineering at the Royal and also to open up the new profits and effectiveness for the site. And I want to thank you and this is an opener for as a memento of it opening up (inaudible) (laughter). And …

Nicole Poirier: I have to open the opener myself.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Yeah, (inaudible)

Nicole Poirier: Oh (laughter) (inaudible). Thank you so much.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Thank you so much for coming.

Carolyn Burke: It looks like a weapon but I'm sure it's not.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: No ((inaudible) (laughter). It's a letter opener. It's very Canadian. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us.

Nicole Poirier: Great.

Dr. Eric Schaffer: And we look forward to you in our next, your joining us on our next web cast.

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