Abstract. This
research used self-assessments on trust and emotional reactions (hedonics) as
well as pragmatic measurements to determine if the UX of two different access
methods to the same money transfer service also affected the perception of
trustworthiness of said service. It confirms Chu & Yuan’s (2013)
observations on how interactivity can affect trust, but further observations of
how trust will be affected by completing an actual money transfer instead of
simply simulating a transfer order are recommended.
1. Introduction
TransferWise is an Estonian-British start-up that
intermediates currency conversions between peers. The users never interact
directly with other users with whom they are converting their currency – price
is set at the interbank rate at the moment of transaction and the user only
enters with his money in the sending currency and receives the converted money
in the other end of the transaction without having to deal with third parties.
This approach eliminates many of the trust issues with converting money without
involving a bank, retaining the economic advantages.
The service has been operating successfully for three
years but only recently launched mobile applications – first for iOS and then
for Android in early 2014. The main object of this study was to evaluate trust
issues with both approaches to the same platform and, through comparison of
pragmatic and hedonic measurements, try to determine if those can be attributed
to user interface issues or stem from the different modes of access.
2.
The object of evaluation
TransferWise shifts all of the money-conversion
operations to the web, eliminating the human factor in most (or all) steps but
for the users themselves. This eliminates trust issues but also creates new
ones – people are used to relying on banks for these operations and banks are
typical last-century human-centered institutions. Eliminating the human
operator on the other side can be jarring for first-time users and this can
lead to mistrust.
According to Chu & Yuan (2013), perceived
user-control, interactivity, responsiveness and connectedness affect trust and
consumer behaviour online. The main object of this study was to determine if
completing the same tasks on the same service using different access methods
would lead to different levels of trust.
2.1
Design procedure
2.1.1 Procedure
Participants
were invited to fill in a form asking for background information containing
Yamagishi & Yamagishi’s General Trust Scale (GTS)-like questions. They then
proceeded to visiting the company’s website and making a short heuristics
evaluation, then completing a series of three tasks – send money to a saved
recipient, locate a previous transaction and modify personal settings – using
the TransferWise platform, both on the web browser and on a mobile phone. Video
was captured of all on-screen interaction as well as from the participants
themselves. After completing each task, participants were invited to select an
emotion and intensity on the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW). At the end of all
three tasks, participants took a post-mortem questionnaire containing more
GTS-like questions to asses a shift in trust. A post-mortem interview was
arranged individually to better understand emotional reactions and shifts in
trust indicated.
Fig. 1. The Geneva Emotion Wheel
2.1.2 Apparatus and
Materials
Two
different access points were used, a common Windows PC running Google Chrome
for web access and an Android phone running the native TransferWise application
downloaded from the Play Store. A second mobile phone was used to film the
interaction to an external memory card. Printed copies of the consent form, the
background questionnaire, the heuristics evaluation form, three Geneva Emotion
Wheels and the post-mortem questionnaire were provided to all participants.
2.1.3 Tools and Methods
Koyote
Software’s Free Screen to Video was used in the Windows machines to capture
on-screen interaction, while on the mobile phone, the native screen video
capture capabilities of Android 4.4 KitKat was used for the same purpose.
Yamagishi & Yamagishi’s GTS evaluation and Bänziger, Tanja, Véronique, Tran, and Scherer’s GEW
evaluation methods were applied to the information provided by the
participants. The post-mortem interviews were used to make sense of this
hedonic layer of information.
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Fig. 2. Screen Capture of Mobile App vs. Website.
2.1.4 Participants
Participants
were nine people with almost-normal gender distribution (five men, four women)
aged 21~35 years old. Participants were screened previously for reason to send
money abroad – only those with family in other countries or other reasonable
expectation to convert money to or from another currency in the next 12 months
were invited to participate.
3. Results and Discussion
In
general, there was a shift in trust for the worst after using both web and
mobile versions of the system, with a more pronounced negative shift in women
and when using the mobile application. Post-mortem interviews revealed that the
generalized shift in trust was mostly related to questions of whether the money
would be delivered to the intended recipient, in the time frame promised and in
the amount expected. This points to the need for a more detailed study with
“live” money transfers that follows participants during the whole money
transfer process, which can take several days.
GEW
emotions also showed a negative shift when comparing web and mobile, with
less-intense positive reactions and more frequent and more-intense negative
reactions when using the mobile application. These were also reflected in the
pragmatic evaluations, showing greater difficulty in completing tasks and,
according to the post-mortem interviews, impaired by some user interface bugs
and glitches. This perfectly reflects Chu & Yuan’s results in comparing E-Trust and
interactivity.
3.1 Recommendations
Pragmatic
UX evaluation was invaluable in interpreting the hedonics results. Especially
metrics like number of clicks and time to complete tasks, which explained
shifts in trust related to poor user experience.
The
GEW is a wonderful but confusing tool, both for participants and for evaluators
afterwards. After the pilot test showed the Wheel itself had some poor UX
aspects, it was decided that evaluators would recommend participants to pick a
single emotion that better represented the task to be assessed and mark its
intensity. This makes comparing emotional reactions difficult, because there
are less overlapping data points between participants. Once again, the
post-mortem interview allowed us to better categorize these reactions.
The
main recommendation to TransferWise is to take Chu & Yuan’s conclusions
in interactivity to heart and trying to make the mobile experience as complete
and fluid as the web experience, this way saving the service from negative
hedonic UX aspects.
It is also recommended to follow this study up with a
more in depth one that follows the participants through the entire process of
an actual transfer, as many of the participants questions on trust were left
unanswered as this was a non-live test where no money transfer actually took place.
A follow up study could also gather more statistically significant numbers, as
the sample of participants for this study was rather limited.
4. Conclusion
The
main conclusion we can take away from this study is that the same platform can
produce different trust responses if accessed by different methods. In a user
base that’s constantly shifting from web to mobile and back again, this is an
important observation as designers must carefully craft the mobile experience
to mitigate or eliminate perceptual differences that can lead to perceived
untrustworthiness.
5.
References
1. Chu, Kuo-Ming, and Benjamin JC Yuan. "The
Effects of Perceived Interactivity on E-Trust and E-Consumer Behaviors: The
Application of Fuzzy Linguistic Scale." Journal
of Electronic Commerce Research 14.1
(2013).
2. Yamagishi,
Toshio, and Midori Yamagishi. "Trust and commitment in the United States
and Japan." Motivation
and emotion 18.2 (1994):
129-166.
3. Yamagishi,
Toshio. "The provision of a sanctioning system as a public good."Journal
of Personality and social Psychology 51.1
(1986): 110.
4. Bänziger,
Tanja, Véronique Tran, and Klaus R. Scherer. "The Geneva Emotion Wheel: A
tool for the verbal report of emotional reactions." Poster presented at ISRE (2005).
