Assessing Usability of Wealth Management Portals using Neurophysiological Tools: Eye-tracking and fNIRS Study

• ¹ LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, Department of Marketing, United States
• ² School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, Drexel University, United States
• ³ University of Pennsylvania, Department of Family and Community Health, United States
• ⁴ Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, United States

Wealth management industry has been going through a digital revolution over the last decade. All major players in the industry now offer online portals to their clients who can now independently, without using brokers or other intermediaries, manage their wealth using such online portals. It is then not surprising that firms are investing large sums of money in creating such portals with an objective that these portals will function as per expectation and anomalies will be limited. To that end, these companies have also begin testing these portals before launching them in the market. Firms often launch their portals based on findings from traditional usability studies and often learn about major issues with their portal after the launch thus signaling poor quality of the brand(s) associated with the portal(Gregg and Walczak 2010 ; Reber et al. 2004; Song and Schwarz 2008). Not surprising that ninety five percent of IT executives surveyed felt that poor websites resulted in loss of revenue (Dyn 2015). Hence, there is a need to develop more rigorous methods of testing these portals so that companies can avoid after launch surprises and the negative consequences that may arise from consumers’ response. Fortunately, newer developments in Neuroergonomic research provide a solution to this issue. Neuroergonomics is defined as the study of the human brain in relation to performance at work and everyday settings (Parasuraman 2003; Parasuraman and Rizzo 2008). We used Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive and portable technology to measure brain activity in addition to eye-tracking. In this study, we assess the usability of a new portal for a large wealth management firm in US. Thirty- seven participants (46 % female, Mean age = 47. 54) representing three types of users of a new web portal for a large fintech firm included– i) first time users of the portal, ii) current clients, and iii) company’s employees. All participants performed two types of tasks on the website-- easy and difficult tasks. Easy tasks required little to no navigation while difficult tasks required some navigation and information search on the portal. At the beginning of the study, subjects’ gaze was calibrated using a research grade eye-tracker. Additionally, we used a wearable and portable neuroimaging technique – Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to monitor participants brain activity as they performed tasks on the portal. fNIRS is a safe, non-invasive and silent technology that measures changes in oxygenated hemoglobin in the cortex (Ayaz et al 2013). fNIRS uses two wavelengths of lights that resonate with oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin and provides a measure of brain activation based on relative changes in these. Also, we mounted a 16-channel sensor pad on subjects’ forehead to measure activity in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain. Subjects were briefed about the study and asked to perform 37 tasks on the new web portal. The number of fixations on the screens as participants performed the tasks was used as the dependent variable in mixed model. The linear mixed effect model revealed a significant effect of task difficulty on fixation counts (F (1, 1301.4) = 207.68, p =.00). There was no main effect of user types (F (2, 31.9) = .30, p =.73) or interaction between user types and task difficulty (F (2, 1301.4) = 2.19, p =.11). Participants had lower fixations for easy tasks (M = 25.27, S.D. = 21.33) compared to difficult tasks (M = 50.63, S.D. = 31.04). An analysis of the neural activity revealed patterns of brain activity that help explain why participants found the difficult tasks more challenging. Across all four quadrants, all participants displayed higher mental effort (as measured by oxygenated HbO changes) for difficult tasks compared to easy tasks (Q1: F (1, 1009.2) = 14.07, p=.00; Q2: F (1, 1022.6) = 6.32, p=.01; Q3: F (1, 954.2) = 9.11, p=.00; Q4: F (1, 992) = 5.15, p=.02). There was no main effect of user types or interaction between user types and task difficulty. Overall, the findings of this study were used to adapt and improve the interface and design of the portal. Since the investments in creating new wealth management portals is rather large, wealth management companies need to ensure that their portals function as per expectation and that customer experiences reflect no major issues. Fortunately, recent advances in eye tracking and brain imaging methods, like fNIRS, provide a more objective assessment of user experience with such portals in naturalistic settings that could not be done with traditional self-reported measures. Figure 1. Eye-tracking measures (fixation count) for Easy vs. Difficult Tasks Figure 2. fNIRS based prefrontal neural measures consistently distinguish Easy vs. Difficult Tasks (HbO changes in Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4)