I did this heuristic analysis of BMO’s app during the early stage of design thinking process for my BMO case study. Doing so gave me a better understanding of BMO’s current design patterns as well as their strengths and weaknesses. This analysis is very useful for me to make sure my new budgeting features would be integrated with the app seamlessly. If you are interested in the case study. Please visit my portfolio.
Principles of Usability Heuristics:
Learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction.
Learnability
Visibility & feedback: The website achieved great visibility and feedback since their actions are visible. ie. A window showing “Success! You’re all set.” after users transfer money from one account to another. The app always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
Affordances: BMO’s app follows real-world conventional rather than system-oriented terms. Users can easily understand the texts. Ie. They use “from your account, “ to your account” simple language. Affordance is also achieved by color codes for errors. Red for more severe errors . Yellow for warning.
Constraints: Proper constraints are used. Ie. Users cannot continue transfer without putting all necessary information.
Consistency: The app is consistent overall with same fonts, same usage of colors to display information. Icons are consistent as well, all are outline icons with same stroke width.
Help and documentation: The app is very limited in functionality, which also makes it easy to navigate. In case of a problem, user can find help easily by going to more on the tab bar at the button.
Efficiency:
One of BMO’s feature allows users to set up an automatic acceptance of e-transfers, so users don’t need to login which improves efficiency.
Memorability
BMO’s app remembers users card number, so they don’t need to input card information every time when logging in.
The app also remembers frequent payees, so users can simply select a payee to make payment.
Errors
Error messages are indicated with an exclamation mark and in red color which follows the common pattern, and are also noticeable and accessible. In addition, error messages appear immediately before users could complete another task.
Overall, BMO’s app is very easy partially also due to the very limited functionality. BMO could improve their user experiences by adding more features that customers want
