Redesign
Posted: Mon 7 January, 2008 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Weirdness 2 Comments »No, not here.
I noticed the other day though that my bank had decided to arbitrarily redesign their online banking log-on area, so that it looked very different from how it used to, yet they hadn’t said anything about it.
Now, when everyone’s banging on about identity theft and phishing scams that direct you to copies of banking sites etc. and get you to add in all your normal log-in details, don’t you think it would’ve been smart to actually let their customers know that they were redesigning it, rather than just doing it and pushing it out to the world? Particularly in the week before Christmas, when customers are likely to
- be using the site more often
- be rather more sensitive than usual to the risk of losing their details/money to some phishing scumbag scammer?
I spoke to their customer services department about it – partly because I wanted to verify I wasn’t falling to some DNS-redirection hack or whatever, but mainly because it just struck me as such a monumentally fucking stupid thing to do – and their response was
Oh yes, I suppose we should’ve done that, shouldn’t we? Oh well, too late now.
Admittedly, I’m paraphrasing slightly – but not by much. The first sentence is verbatim, the second is paraphrased.
my bank had changed there design of there online banking not only once but twice now over the 2 years ive been using online banking, and wasnt told a think, only message i got was when i logged on, i found a message on my messages part telling me about the changes when theyd been done, these days with people having email thought it be a good idea to email people about up comming changes be cheaper than ringing them hey
My Bank (Bank Of Ireland) has changed their website design three times in the past year. But not just the website design, oh no.
They’ve fundamentally changed the system for logging on to their online banking service. From a form with random inputs (if that’s what it’s called, you know the “enter the 1st, 3rd and 6th digits thingy) to a drop-down-box system for inputting the same data.
It would appear to be more secure (no keylogging is possible, or whatever), but it’s still all for naught if it makes me think it might not actually be my bank anymore. Which it won’t be for much longer.
It’s also the slowest website in the known universe. Every time I go to it I end up opening a tab to speedtest.net to make sure my broadband connection hasn’t suddenly become a dial-up one.