CheckFree was in our offices this week, wowing us with their latest user interface capabilities. I was impressed: as product managers, they understand that delivery of higher end-user convenience (for online banking, bill management, etc) isn’t possible unless you essentially embed rather than expose the dreaded control panel. As with automobiles, online finance continues to evolve, and yet some product managers falsely believe that you can’t deliver more capabilities (such as scheduling of payments, ability to view multiple accounts and activity summaries, etc) without requiring the customer to become more sophisticated. This thinking flies in the face with what research shows: today’s new online banking customer is less sophisticated than yesterday’s, even as new products do more and more.

One reason that online banking and bill pay growth is slowing down is because we keep sending the customer to the dreaded control panel. Ever board a plane when the pilots are just getting settled in, and take a glance to the left? All you see is knobs, stitches and instruments, and I argue that this isn’t much more mysterious than many banks’ control panels for customizing online banking, even though this need not be the case. I’ve been a product manager in four companies, and I understand that the last mile of the end-user experience is often overlooked as the most critical factor (as measured by adoption, cross-sell, customer service costs, loyalty, etc).

Key take-aways: make the dreaded cockpit “control panel” the last resort by making products more intuitive, anticipating mainstream customer needs, providing across-the-board families of customization capabilities by category of end-user type, and embedding customization within the activity (for example, allowing a user to select “more like this” or “less like this” when receiving a particular online or mobile banking alert).

As the last mile of product management the end user experience is the toughest mile, but most important one.