Everyone seems to be posting about their banking experiences, so I thought I would post one of mine.I’ve been a HSBC customer for about as long as I can remember, and not had any reason to complain. However, recently I have been finding more and more things about their online experience which tend to annoy me. Here is the latest…The other day I was attempting to transfer some money from my main account to a savings account, the process seemed easy… select the account you want to transfer money to, enter an amount and specify when I want to make the transfer. I clicked ‘confirm‘, and I was greeted with this screen:

We are unable to proceed with your request. Please select an option from the left hand menu to continue. Hold on a second… why were you unable to proceed with my request? I’m trying to make a simple transaction and you are telling me that you can’t do it? Why? This error messaging is missing a critical aspect of usability - the provision of user feedback as to what the problem was, or indeed steps which I can take to resolve whatever is going on. I don’t even have any indication if this is a temporary issue with HSBC’s website, or if the problem is more fundamental.Oh well… since I can’t seem to do what I want to do online I decide to send HSBC an e-mail from the website. I select the account I want to make a query about, and start writing my message, spellcheck, and click ‘send‘.

We are unable to deal with your request because you have entered unsupported character(s). Please try again. At this point it becomes clear that HSBC are out to get me, I can’t even tell them about a problem I encountered with their website! Again, its not providing me with useful or user friendly feedback - its not even telling me what characters are unsupported so that I can amend my message. In fact, why am I seeing this in the first place? Surely a better approach would be to strip unsupported characters and send the message anyway, if further information was required then HSBC could call me to confirm.I go back to my message and remove all characters which are not A-Z or 0-9 and I get the same message again about unsupported characters, at this point I begin scratching my head even further….I suppose the moral of this story is that designers and developers should think carefully about error messaging in their applications. Granted, only 1 in 1000 users may see a specific error condition, but still if you want your web app to be usable then you should support the user in recovering from an error, even if that means telling them to call a customer services representative. Web applications should provide an experience which users (and/or customers) enjoy using, and would be happy to return to. In HSBC’s case, their application does the job, 98% of the time, but for the other 2% when it doesn’t work, it leaves the user feeling very unfulfilled, frustrated and dissatisfied. (more…)

Its good to see some activity in the local Ruby on Rails community down here in Brighton. The place has always been a hub for traditional Web design and development, but up until now it has been hard to find Ruby aficionado’s who you can enjoy a beer with. Thankfully it looks as though this is about to change - James McCarthy is organizing a usergroup event down here in Brighton, aimed at hardcore Rails enthusiasts and novices. See you there!Brighton Ruby usergroup meetup (A meeting of Ruby on Rails novices and professionals in the Brighton area) [2007/01/09 19:00 to 2007/01/09 22:00] (more…)

Firstly a big thanks to Dave Child for the cookie, hopefully it was oatmeal and raisan! For those of you going “huh?”, I have been blog tagged, a game started by Jeff Pulver which seems to be spreading quite quickly. The object of the game is to reveal 5 things about you, which most readers probably don’t know, then nominate 5 friends to do the same. If they don’t reply within 48 hours, then they will loose 5 fingers in a horrible goat-related accident. (Okay, that last sentence was a lie).

1. One Christmas, at university, I painted myself green and dressed up as the Grinch.Unfortunately I don’t have any photo’s handy at the moment (when I get home I shall have a dig around on my other computer), so for now, enjoy this lovely picture of one of my best friends. Grinch picture located!

   

2. I’ve actually been an extra on the Catherine Cookson TV Drama, The Rag Nymph. I was 14 at the time, and got the day off from school. If you happen to have the DVD at home, I’m the delivery boy in the last scene who takes the bread from the woman from Byker Grove, puts it onto the cart and pushes it down the street.Extra work was fun, in that you get paid alright for doing very little, though it did have the tendancy to get repetitive. If any casting directors are reading, I’m looking for an opportunity to move on to a more challenging role - drop me an email and we’ll see what we can do! Available for anything from Mr Muscle commercials to love scenes with Scarlett Johansson.
3. Earlier this year I bought myself a lovely new Macbook, making the switch from Windows. I haven’t looked back.
4. One of my favourite jobs was when I worked at Klute nightclub in Durham. A place that can only be described as a garden shed packed with people dancing to really cheesy music. Working there, I learned to appreciate 80’s cheese!It was voted 2nd Worst Nightclub in Europe by FHM Magazine. The worst nightclub, in Germany, burnt down so I like to think we inherited the title!
5. I’m looking to maybe move over to the USA in 2007, fingers crossed on that one!

Finaly, James McCarthy, Tom Anthony, Andy Mitchell, Sheila Farrell and Francis Berriman; Tag, you’re it! (more…)