??? 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).