UI Annoyances: BNP Paribas Fortis

Internet has become very popular thanks to the new technological developments in internet technology. People are doing their daily tasks via internet and it saves us a lot of time and reduces the overhead. One of the applications we often make use of is internet banking. It has many benefits over old-fashioned banking where people have to visit a bank in order to fulfil their needs. Internet banking can be a useful alternative. However, as the remainder of the text points out, it might have some issues of its own.

We expect internet banking to be reliable, secure and easy to use. In the past years there have been some serious problems corcerning internet banking security. Today experts have introduced some solid solutions for security. Another problem is the perception of these services by users. When internet banking offered by banks is really difficult to understand people rather don't use it or do wrong things when using it.

We can use BNP Paribas Fortis as a concrete example of an online banking UI problem. When we want to do some transaction via the PC banking service of Bnp Paribas Fortis we need to log in first, as shown below.

After logging in we go to the transaction page and fill the blanks. We start the transaction by clicking on "Nu versturen" button.

Next the system asks us for confirmation. We might notice that something (e.g. the amount) isn't right in which case we would like to correct it. We can do this by clicking on "Vorige" button but we choose to do it by clicking on "Back" button of browser. We get the following error message. Yet, it seemed a plausible assumption that the general "Back" button would take us one step back in the process.

When encountering errors, people often try to go back to a point where everything seemed all right. When we try to go back by using the browser's back button once more, we get another error message. After this point we can't go back anymore to what we were doing. If we use the back button again, we return to the login screen and have to start all over again.

This kind of things lead to frustration and have a negative impact on user experience. This shows the flaw in the developers' design. When things like these happen people often start to look at the software as suspicious and unreliable.

This example shows that user experience can greatly benefit from the use of structured methodologies in UI design.