That Norwegian Guy

To me a good online banking experience is the most imporant aspect of a bank. It’s how I deal with the bank 99.9% of the time (I still don’t have a mortgage). I’m willing to jump to any bank that will give me this. But from what I’ve gathered by talking to my peers, my bank, BankWest, is as good as it gets. Then something amazing happened: BankWest redesigned.

That’s what I first noticed since I always go directly to the login page. Though they’ve renovated their entire site, which must have been a lot of work for someone, good on them! It’s an improvement, but I still miss a lot. I immediately put on my scrutinising glasses, so this post is going to mostly point out the negative sides. But that’s what the comments are for – correcting my mistakes.

The media release lists a few new features, most of which seems to benefit BankWest more than the customer. Such as  ”Credit Card Limit Increases”, ”Tailored Product Promotion Banners”, and an ”Offers & Apply Facility” which only offers new credit cards. The positive parts is an iPhone/handhelds version, and a progress bar for the payment section. Period. I feel bad for putting those to in the same sentence, I hope they didn’t spend the same amount of work on both. But that is all that is in the news article. I would have liked to see a write-up on what else has been done, from a user and technical point of view, front-end and back-end.

For mobile

Naturally I had to check if there was an iPad specific version as well. It isn’t, but it defaults to the mobile version, which surprised me a bit. As a result the input fields ends up being extremely wide. An option to switch to the default web interface would have been appreciated. Nevertheless, I decide to pay some bills using the iPad instead of the laptop. The large navigation column from the desktop has been replaced with various metaphors for navigating around, and I have no problem getting directly to where I need to be.

I come across my first obstacle as I tapped the input field for amount to be paid. Turns out I just can’t move the selector to the start of pre-filled numbers. I assume the problem is with some padding/positioning in either the css and/or the javascript dealing with the input fields. Also they haven’t used the input type=”number” attribute, so you get the default text keyboard on mobile Safari. This would probably affect other new browsers as well (Opera?). It would’ve been easy to save a tap here.

On the desktop

This is when I started writing down notes for this post, so by the time I got back to the browser it had not surprisingly timed out. So I give the normal web version a go.

It’s been my pet peeve, and I can’t believe they didn’t get rid of the big warning message disply on login whenever I hold down Shift while typing my password. The alert reads:

Note: Caps Lock is on. Having Caps Lock on may cause you to enter your password incorrectly.

I see what they’re trying to do, but can they at least get the keys right?

Once logged in things look new and refreshed. But hardly anything has changed. The navigation is all the same. All elements are in the same location, in the same layout, giving the same information. There’s the same old links with same old actions. It’s been redesigned, but not realigned, so actually using it is the exact same experience, except it looks more 2010.

By the way – I’m not the only one who has noticed the redesign. “Toolmantim” is offering a case of beer for the development team to implement his proposed change for choosing a payment type.

The homepage

To get to the login page you have to choose an option from a dropdown select list, and it spawns a new window for me to log in on. First of all: pop-up windows? Really? I think I’m grown up enough to decide where I want my browser tabs. Secondly: Why hiding what must be one of the most used functions? Surely there must be a large enough number of users who go directly to the online banking for them to validate a direct login, or a direct link to the portal you use the most often. I hope there’s user testing and stats that prove me wrong. The funny thing is I didn’t even think about it until I disabled the CSS, and and it turns out that the select list is really a list of links styled as a select box. At least that means it’ll be easy to change further down the road.

Markup

The markup is …weird. There’s a lot of inline javascript. So much I wonder if it’ll even work without javascript. Well, it definitly won’t let me pay bills without javascript enabled. Not that it tells me it won’t, I just get stuck on the first selectbox without a ‘go’ button. There’s also a lot of conditional comments filtering out stuff from IE to see. My 10 second test in IE8 revieled square corners on the login button, but not much else.

Finishing rant

I signed up with BankWest purely by chance, as they had a branch close to my house. I wonder if they would’ve let me sign up and do everything online and never had to set foot in a branch? Because that’ what I am used to from Norway, where I signed in with Skandiabanken way back when they showed all the old players how it could be done.

Part of this is service. I can call them at any time and speak to someone. The online personal chat help thing actually has somebody manning the chat that will answer you. There’s no fees. But most importantly, I can do everything I need to online. Oh, and did I mention – no fees! It pisses me off that the bank will charge for me to do their legwork. I let them keep my savings and do whatever it is banks do with my money these days, and they let me do what I want with it myself.

Tags:   banking · redesignNo Comments