Is Wachovia Login Form Usable?
The Redesign
Wachovia.com recently updated the design of their homepage. With redesigns, I usually would give it a try for a week or two before putting the final verdict. After all, I’m a designer myself and 100% aware that people generally hate change.
However, there is something about this new login form that makes me stop and think before proceeding with what I have to do. In web design, breaking user’s flow is generally a bad thing. A very bad thing.
I’ve been a Wachovia customer for over 5 years now, and never had trouble using the site. I use the site for mostly online banking (checking my balance, transfer money, pay bills, etc.), so being able to login easily is an important aspect for me as a user.
In order to garner a good user experience, login forms should be kept simple and straight-forward. Username/email field should be presented first, followed next by a password field, and finally a submit button. Optionally you would have the “Remember Me” box, usually placed before the submit button. You’ve seen this form many times in many different sites.
This is where things get confusing for wachovia.com.
Instead of the usual approach, their login form is organized the following way: username field, “Remember Me” box, password field, and submit button. Nothing too earth-shattering at first, but let’s try using it.
The Problem
You start at the username field (the site is nice enough to focus your cursor in this first field). After typing that in, the majority of user would press TAB to go to the next field. Usually this next field is a password field, but it really is a “Remember my User ID” box.
So by habit, somebody like me who has used the site for many years would start typing in the password and then press enter to log in. Instead of my online account page, it gives me this following error message:
Then you press the “Back” button (or the Back button on your browser), but now the form has completely stopped working (pressing the submit button or Enter will not submit the form) – until you close your tab and visits the site again.
I wonder how many people have done this same exact thing.
With Wachovia.com new redesign, one of their focus was to “make the online account system as user-friendly, more efficient, and customizable.” They were aware that 79.3% of customers use the site primarily for online account management. So why make it harder?
This whole thing can be avoided simply by keeping the old log in form. After the 100th time of being placed in that error page, eventually I will probably learn to press TAB twice to enter my password. After all, isn’t it a goal of every web designer to make their design obvious?
Have you had trouble with Wachovia.com or similar experience with badly-designed login forms?
Design by Committee Video: Hilarious but true
A very clever and funny video depicting the oh-so-common design process that involves a lot of people, a.k.a Design by Committee.
Background: Design by Committee usually consists of a designer and a group of people (usually clients) who seemingly do not communicate with each other. This process is usually accompanied by a flurry of additional features that were never mentioned in the requirements gathering phase, and it goes on throughout the life cycle of the design phase.
This process usually happens because design is subjective; when it comes to design, everyone is a designer. When this happens, in most cases the web designer ends up being a pixel-pusher doing everything the client tells them to do in order to satisfy the client and make them happy.
It’s not entirely the client’s fault that this happens. It usually comes down to a misunderstanding of the process where the client is simply trying to help solve the problem instead of letting the designer (who they hired) to do that job. So instead of saying “I’m not sure if that pink background color will appeal to our male secondary target market”, the client would instead say “Can we try blue or darker background instead of that pink?”
I feel that the appropriate and more productive way to handle communication such as design feedback is by focusing more on the project goals than the specifics.
Designers are problem solvers. By focusing on the project goals, the client will actually be using the expertise of the designer (that they hired) to solve their problem. Also this will allow the designer to use his/her intuition and judgment to design as he sees fit.
Think Apple. Steve Jobs is a one-man dictator when it comes to design, and look at how successful Apple’s product design is!
What experience have you had dealing with Design by Committee?
hmuljadi.com got a makeover!
Today will mark the third redesign for my personal website. I think this time around I’m very close to getting where I wanted.
When I got the site, I wanted a way to showcase the work I’ve done in the past as well as provide a really seamless experience for whoever is checking this site out. My old design had a few pages – About Me, Portfolio, Contact Page, and a little snippet of digg feeds of articles I recently dugg – but I felt like some of the content there was forced just to fill up the space. I thought a redesign was in order.
This new design now incorporates a one-page homepage that displays everything I wanted to share and a really easy way to go through the portfolio items. The last two designs were also dark and grungy, so I wanted to try something light.
From start to finish, it took me about a week to complete:
- 1 day for gathering requirements
- 2 days of wireframing
- 3 days of mocking up the design
- 1 day for programming the HTML/CSS/JavaScript
There are still some kinks to work out (i.e. the portfolio accordion section doesn’t animate as smooth as it should), but overall I’m pretty happy with it.
What do you think about the new hmuljadi.com?