让银行业爱上平板的神秘推手
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例如，这家公司帮助为花旗设计的苹果（Apple）iPad应用软件去年7月一经发布，就在花旗客户中大受欢迎。它提供彩色互动图表，可以呈现用户过去、现在和未来的消费储蓄习惯。同时，这款软件还可以根据年龄等因素筛选后，形象地比较个人客户和大众（加总，佚名）的支出情况。Fjord的商业设计副总裁普拉盛•艾格拉沃表示：宗旨是要向花旗客户展现出“他们个人的金融生活”。而且，应用软件用户也能支付账单、进行其他一般性的银行活动。 虽然这款软件外观典雅，使用简单，但当人们主要用其支付账单时，真的会用它的不同功能吗？“数据显示，77%的用户使用了这款软件的所有三大块功能，”花旗银行北美（Citibank North America）的移动和新兴科技策略总监安德雷斯•沃伯格-斯多克表示。 确实，客户们喜欢这款iPad应用软件，似乎胜过花旗在聘请Fjord前自主设计的iPhone应用软件。花旗iPad应用软件发布后的头六周，它的下载次数就超过了花旗iPhone 应用软件下载次数的五倍多（这组对比剔除了设备持有时间和软件发布时间的长短等因素）。此外，有5,000多名从未创建网络或移动用户ID的花旗客户登陆了iPad应用软件，说明这款平板电脑应用软件引来了原先的非数字化用户。 用户对软件的评价一如既往地积极。发布五周后，花旗iPad应用软件被选为“苹果应用商店员工最爱软件”。科技研究公司Forrester 2012年1月的案例研究点评，这款应用软件具有“任务流简单、直观”等优点。不过，也不全是赞誉之词。《纽约时报》（New York Times）2月份曾报道，曾经出现过一次令人极度难堪技术故障，导致花旗iPad应用软件的一些客户交易被重复执行。不过，即使在遭遇了这次技术故障之后，这款iPad应用软件目前获得的用户平均评分仍为3.5颗星（满分五颗星），（相比之下，花旗iPhone软件的用户平均评分仅为2.5颗星）。 |
The Apple (AAPL) iPad app the firm helped design for Citi, for instance, was a hit with the bank's customers when it was released in July of last year. It features colorful interactive graphs that display a user's past, present, and future spending and saving habits. The app also features visual comparisons of the customer's expenditures and those of the crowd (aggregated and anonymized), filtered by factors such as age. The concept was to present Citi customers with "their financial lives," says Prashant Agrawal, Fjord's vice president of Business Design. And app users can also pay bills and other prosaic banking activities. As elegant-looking and easy to use as the app is, are people really using its various features, when they're primarily there to pay bills? "The numbers show us that 77% of users are engaging with all three sections of the app," says Andres Wolberg-Stok, Director of Strategy for Mobile and Emerging Technologies, Citibank North America. Indeed, customers seem to prefer it to Citi's earlier iPhone app, which the bank designed in-house before enlisting Fjord. During the first six weeks after the Citi iPad app's release, the number of downloads was more than five times that of the number of Citi iPhone app downloads (the comparison was adjusted for length of device ownership and time from launch.) And more than 5,000 Citi customers who had never created online or mobile user IDs signed up for the iPad app, suggesting that the tablet application lured in previously non-digital customers. Reviews have been -- and remain -- positive. Five weeks after launch, the Citi iPad app was selected as an "App Store Staff Favorite." And a January 2012 case study from technology researcher Forrester (FORR) said the app "offers simple, intuitive task flows" among other compliments. It hasn't been all praise, though. A highly embarrassing technical glitch in the app caused unwanted duplicate transactions for some customers, as the New York Times reported in February. Still, the iPad app is currently rated by users with an average of three and a half stars out of five, even after the mishap. (In comparison, the Citi iPhone app is rated, on average, a mere two and a half stars). |
