In part one of our series on website usability, we looked at the
all-important homepage. But the best homepage won’t do you much good unless
you can convert visitors into paying customers. For that you need an
effective sales process capped by an easy-to-use application. Online credit
applications have evolved considerably during the past five years and are
now relatively painless to complete, usually far superior to their paper
counterparts, which are plagued with missing data, illegible markings, not
to mention transcription errors in your own back office.

At OBR, we’ve looked at online application-form design on a number of
occasions, finding a wide variety in quality (see Table 11, below). This
time, we are using a more rigorous approach applying our proprietary OBR
WebCheck criteria www.webcheckanalysis.com
 and scoring Citibank’s application across 54 criteria. Although the
bank’s application is very good, there is still much room for improvement,
as witnessed by its sub-50% score.

Citibank credit card application

Card application

Table 12
Citibank Credit Card Application Process

OBR analysis using WebCheck* criteria

Source: Online Banking Report, 2/04 Wt = weight with 5 the highest
importance