Category: Design

I used to love doing my online bank­ing through Fifth Third. Their old sys­tem allowed me to make prompt pay­ments that were imme­di­ate­ly reflect­ed on my bal­ance, so I always knew exact­ly how much mon­ey was at my dis­pos­al at any giv­en time. Their newish sys­tem threw all of that out of the win­dow. I’ve nev­er been one to have over­drafts, but since they went through what I’m sure they con­sid­er an upgrade, I end up with one just about every oth­er month. Here’s an exam­ple of how the new sys­tem works:

Let’s start with $500 in the account. You get your cable bill for $100, and log on to make the pay­ment. Fifth Third’s sys­tem sched­ules the pay­ment to be made 2–3 days after you enter it. Your account still shows a bal­ance of $500. The day before the pay­ment is to be made, you decide to can­cel the pay­ment and go in to do so. Besides being ridicu­lous­ly hard to find out how to can­cel the pay­ment, when you final­ly get there, you’re unable to because appar­ent­ly the sys­tem is already pro­cess­ing the trans­ac­tion. The pay­ment does NOT show up on the item­ized pend­ing trans­ac­tions screen, but IS reflect­ed in the total pend­ing pay­ments line. Your bal­ance still shows as $500. The next day, the day of the pay­ment, the cable pay­ment com­plete­ly dis­ap­pears from your pend­ing trans­ac­tions list, and is list­ed as PAID in the pay­ment activ­i­ty screen. Your bal­ance remains at $500. The day AFTER the pay­ment is made, your bal­ance is updat­ed to $400. Fair­ly com­pli­cat­ed to fol­low along, but not impos­si­ble, if you only pay one bill at a time.

Let’s say I have $500 in the account. I get my cable bill and sched­ule the pay­ment. The next day I get my phone bill and sched­ule the pay­ment. The day after I get my elec­tric and gas bills, and sched­ule those pay­ments. Now can you keep track of what’s pend­ing and what your bal­ance is for the stag­gered 2–3 day cycle it takes to pay each bill? Maybe if you’re a COBOL main­frame.

I know NO ONE who actu­al­ly thinks about their mon­ey in a stag­gered 2–3 day pay­ment cycle. If I write a check for $100 and give it to a cashier, and they take 2–3 days to cash it, I don’t think that I’m still in pos­ses­sion of that $100. As soon as I hand it over, it is mon­ey I no longer have. The Fifth Third user inter­face should reflect this human par­a­digm, not the way the com­put­er process­es trans­ac­tions.

There’s an easy way to fix this, and it’s even a com­pro­mise between the two par­a­digms. It appears that Fifth Third has tried to make it work, but they’re fail­ing there as well. Show the math. The offi­cial bal­ance, minus the pend­ing trans­ac­tions equals the avail­able bal­ance. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the sev­er­al dif­fer­ent pend­ing trans­ac­tions screens NEVER agree with each oth­er in regard to the math, and don’t give enough detail for a human to make sense of what’s going on.

On the Account Activ­i­ty page you get a lit­tle box that gives your bal­ance as of yes­ter­day’s date; a line for total pend­ing trans­ac­tions, a line for oth­er trans­ac­tions and a line that shows avail­able bal­ance. You can­not click on the pend­ing or oth­er trans­ac­tions lines to see where they are get­ting those num­bers. If you click on the Pend­ing or Oth­er links to get an expla­na­tion, a 404 win­dow pops up.

There is also a pend­ing pay­ments screen on the Make Pay­ments page. This page takes your avail­able bal­ance from the first page (the one that you get from sub­tract­ing pend­ing pay­ments) and sub­tracts pend­ing pay­ments from it. It’s always in red for me. The math does­n’t remote­ly reflect the oth­er pend­ing pay­ment screen.

And don’t get me start­ed on the fact that my mort­gage pay­ments (also through Fifth Third) don’t even appear as pend­ing trans­ac­tions, the mon­ey just dis­ap­pears and shows up on the item­ized list of post­ed trans­ac­tions. I have to have a reminder on my Google Cal­en­dar so I know when that mon­ey is going to be tak­en out. If you bank with Fifth Third and have your mort­gage through them, you should be able to set up that pay­ment through their online sys­tem instead of the third par­ty they use.

And that’s just me bitch­ing about the math. The user expe­ri­ence is Byzan­tine. There are frames with­in frames with­in frames, each with their own scroll bar, some are ver­ti­cal scroll bars, some are hor­i­zon­tal scroll bars. There are fly­outs with­in fly­outs that make me click 3 more times than I should have in order to pay a bill, or sched­ule a pay­ment. A pay­ment that can no longer be can­celed does not give a prompt explain­ing why it can’t be can­celed, the option just isn’t there. I don’t need to be able to assign a car icon to my car pay­ment, I need to be able to see how much mon­ey I have.

The most impor­tant thing I’ve learned from work­ing on gov­ern­ment web­sites is that cit­i­zens do not give a shit about how pret­ty or bell&whistly a site is. They want the infor­ma­tion they’ve come to get, they want to pay their prop­er­ty tax­es with as lit­tle fuss as pos­si­ble, and they want every­thing to be clear and con­cise, so they can go back to watch­ing YouTube ASAP. This same expec­ta­tion applies to bank­ing. Show me my mon­ey and what is being done with it.

This is what I’d like to see at a glance:

Oh, hey, look. I can see that I’m going to be in the red if I don’t can­cel my phone bill pay­ment. I see that I can’t can­cel the cable bill because it’s already being processed. I see the dates that each bill will be paid. I see that the bal­ance after pay­ments is effec­tive through 7–3 and I can plan which bills to pay and which to hold until next pay­day because I can tell:

• How much mon­ey I have
• How much of that has already been assigned
• How much is left after

The list of all trans­ac­tions can be on anoth­er page, the man­age pay­ees sec­tion can be on anoth­er page, every­thing can be on oth­er pages. I want some­thing that looks like my check­book. I might go back to using my check­book. Buy­ing stamps is cheap­er than pay­ing over­draft fees. Unfor­tu­nate­ly there’s no way to get past the wall of basic cus­tomer-ser­vice folks to speak to some­one who might have the pow­er to affect how their bank­ing works, so I’m reduced to writ­ing a bitch­ing weblog post.

The old sys­tem was sim­pler, and sim­pler is bet­ter when deal­ing with your mon­ey day to day. I should­n’t need to be a CPA to under­stand what my bank is doing with my mon­ey.