Wow…. I can’t believe it has been over a month since I posted here. It has been a hectic month, but I’ll try not to let things go quite so quiet again.

I celebrated another birthday yesterday, and I’m slowly nursing off the hangover in front of the Eurovision Song Contest - a quality piece of entertainment!

I’ve been having a clear-out at home (anyone want some hawaiian shirts?). It is amazing as to the sheer volumes of junk which one seems to amass. Wether it be old birthday cards, clothes which you wore through some of the more memorable times or just random trinkets that you may have picked up on holiday or even just on a night out. Going through all of it brings feelings which you don’t get when you are looking at the average website.

The web is a strange medium… pages age, especially the design elements used on them (I’d imagine gradient fills and rounded corners will be held with the same esteem as blink tags in 5-10 years time!). Yet, whilst designs become dated, the fidelity of the site itself does not change. There are no fingerprints, no coffee stains, scratches or signs of wear and tear. Color’s stay strong and true, never fading. Its interesting to wonder, if these things were carried forth onto the Web, wether we would be looking at a better or worse user experience?

When I left school, we all signed messages on each others shirts - good wishes for the future. You may carve your name or a special message into items. These things have carried over into the digital world - in the form of discussion forums, guest-books and shoutboxes, albeit in perhaps a slightly more controlled and ordered fashion.

How can we bring together technology and lessons from the ‘old world’ in order to create more sophisticated and engaging experience? Any thoughts?

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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…)