Have you ever wondered if there’s an ideal location for a search tool on your website? Or if there’s a “best practice” for account comparison tools? Or if the names of your main menu tabs are conventional and, if not, whether this hurts the usability of your site? These are the kinds of questions we help our clients answer on a daily basis, drawing on our deep knowledge of retail financial services websites and our understanding of Web usability principles circa 2008. These are also the kinds of questions that serve as the focal point for a new research project we’re on the verge of completing – the Corporate Insight Website Usability Guide.

Since we first started tracking financial websites in 1997, we’ve seen their design, functionality, navigation and usability improve, sometimes by leaps and bounds. In the process, we’ve seen so many good (and bad) versions of the same core features that we’ve developed some clear opinions about what works and what doesn’t from a design and usability perspective. While we haven’t reached a consensus on every issue – some analysts think a customizable homepage is a must-have while others still see it as more of a luxury – we have developed comprehensive standards for evaluating the functionality and usability of financial websites.

Over the years, we’ve found it difficult to impart this collective knowledge to new employees without a fairly long, hands-on apprenticeship. In order to shorten that learning curve, senior managers here at Corporate Insight recently put their heads together and began work on a comprehensive financial services website usability guide.

To develop this guide, we’ve scoured the websites of the 60+ firms we cover for our Monitor services in search of the best and worst in design, navigation and usability. We’ve detected clear patterns both within industries (e.g., banking) and across the sector (e.g., financial services).  For example, more than half of the mutual fund sites we cover use fly-out menus. Less than 20% of the bank and card sites offer them, though. Those same mutual fund sites are also more than twice as likely as bank sites to use “liquid layout,” or a dynamically adjusting page width – a best practice that we wish more sites would embrace.

In addition to analyzing the sites we know so well, we considered the findings of mainstream usability experts like Steve Krug and Jakob Nielsen, as well as the principles outlined in the federal government’s own usability.gov. We’ve also spoken with experienced interaction designers and searched for other perspectives to enrich our understanding of usability. In the process, we’ve refined our own understanding of Web design best practices and applied this knowledge to the field we know so well – retail financial services.

While originally intended for internal use, the guide has evolved into something bigger and better than we originally expected. It covers a host of topics like intra-page tabs, hyperlink design, main menu structure, page layout, site search and many more. We’re considering whether it might make sense to publish some form of it as a special syndicated study in 2008. It might also be the basis for a series of white papers. Either way, the core content could really benefit any financial services firm with a Web presence. If this sounds like knowledge your company could use, please feel to drop us a line and tell us what you think.