Almost every bank, credit card company and pretty much everything else is trying to get people convert to online banking and payment system nowadays. It makes a lot of sense because usually that means big savings for them having to process fewer paperwork manually (that’s what I think anyway). But sometimes they are just so badly implemented that doing anything online with some of these companies just cause me more headaches.
Take, for example, one of the credit card companies I have been using for quite sometime. One month, as if they’ve just decided they were going to make their online transactions more secured the night before, they implemented a popular feature: provide an answer to a secret question that only you’d know.
The only problem with that was, their questions didn’t make any god damn sense — one question asks for my mother’s maiden name — as if that’s so secret for Asians… Some countries simply do not adopt that practice and any friend of mine would know what my mother’s maiden name is. Another example is a series of stupid questions that even I don’t have the answers to:
1. My favorite sports team — hell, I do NOT have any! I don’t even like sports that much!
2. My favorite restaurant in college — WTF! I was a fu*king college student! I was lucky to have a warm meal, let alone a “favorite” restaurant!
3. My high school — and this is secure how?
After a couple of attempts, the system got thrown into an exception that the designers hadn’t designed it for…. It simply gave me a blank question expecting me to give an answer to… Seriously… WTF! Finally the system bumped me out and asked me to call them during “normal business hours”…. With all the crazy fees and interest rates they are charging people, they ought to have a 24×7 hotline…
And stupid stuff like this extends to stupid interface designs like the MSN Live Messenger, Internet Explorer 7, Dell’s product site among others. With all the money they have, can’t they just hire some decent usability designers and testers? God damn it!
OK… I feel better now. Just a quick rant on thoughtless designs by idiots… If only they took half the time to do what Apple would have done…