Does comfort with technology affect use of wealth management platforms? Usability testing with fNIRS and eye-tracking

Abstract

Most wealth management firms offer online platforms where investors with varied levels of comfort with technology manage their portfolios. Past research shows that comfort with technology is crucial for users’ acceptance of new technologies. We investigated how users’ comfort level with technology influences their use of a new wealth management online platform. We used a multi-modal approach that incorporates survey, behavioral, eye-tracking and neural measures to assess investors’ comfort with technology on web-platform usability to provide a rigorous test of the effects of comfort with technology on usability experiences for a wealth management firm. Our findings suggest that traditional survey measures do not show any differences in users’ evaluations. However, behavioral and neurophysiological measures reveal insights that traditional survey measures fail to reveal.