I’ve been carping on my friends lately that they should dump Bank of America. Their latest scheme to extract money from their customers comes in the form of a $5 monthly fee for debit card use. I’m hoping the $5 monthly fee can be sufficient impetus to finally dump that shitty bank.
I’m a proponent of Arianna Huffington’s Move Your Money Project.  By proponent, I mean a booster: someone who touts the principle as one worth following. Though as much as I’ve touted the project, I still have an account at a national, too-big-to-fail bank: Wells Fargo. I have my main accounts with Wells Fargo for the simple reason that there is a Wells Fargo ATM across the street and a Wells Fargo branch a block and a half away. This convenience is hard to give up, but I dislike being a hypocrite even more than giving up the convenience (and I do feel like having a Wells Fargo account makes me a bit of a hypocrite).
The San Francisco Fire Credit Union has five stars on yelp and a pretty website, so I’m going with them. Also, I can sign up online! After fifteen minutes suffering though some seriously annoying user interface issues on their website, I have an account! Yay!
If you’re going to join me in moving to SF Fire Credit Union, I suggest you go into their branch. The new-account stuff on their website is frustrating and may turn you off.
I signed up for an account today with San Francisco Fire Credit Union. I wrote about this decision here. (Since this is a UI post, I want to keep the political stuff separate.)
I like writing about UI issues. It’s often the only way to adequately describe a problem. It also saves the call center from having to listen to my complaining.
So, let’s dive in.
The new-account signup process is pretty straightforward:
User is informed there will be a five dollar fee to open up account.
User selects what type of accounts he wants (I picked four of them: checking, savings, money market, and a really neat one called “holiday savings” that’s basically a Christmas fund)
User picks password
User offered overdraft protection
User shown TOS, EULA, Fees, Disclosures and Agreements (which, by the way, were in plain English)
User fills out personal information on successive screens
Review page
Several pages where they check user’s identity against others with the same name (this was a series of yes/no questions)
Account approved screen
User presented with offer for Home Equity line of credit (I said no)
User selects how to fund new account (Credit Card and some other choice, I forget)
User inputs payment information
User presented with Deposit Information and final approval button
This seems like a lot of steps but it’s really not, considering you’re opening a bank account and they need all this info. And it was mostly pretty quick.
I ran into the first problem with picking a password.
SFFCU uses a 1990’s password philosophy: between 6 and 10 characters. This is insecure. My Wells Fargo password is 32 characters long.
I don’t want to make light of this issue by referring to a cartoon, but XKCD explains this better than I ever could:
Click to see original
Encountering low character limits on passwords is aggravating, especially when it’s for a site that stores my financial information. It causes fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of users who are savvy when it comes to security – a population that is growing. I give thumbs-up for allowing special characters but I’d really like to see the limit increased north of 22 characters. There’s no reason not to (it’s not like longer passwords take up a whole lot of space).
The next issue I ran into was inputing payment information to fund the account.
There’s a javascript running on this page which prevents me from copy/pasting my credit card information into the fields on this page. Obviously, this is not a big deal, but it is a little annoying. It means I have to leave the computer, find my wallet, get the credit card out, and input the numbers manually and hope I don’t make a mistake. I tried to turn off the javascript but that just broke the page altogether. Arggghh!
The next issue I ran into was at the end screen, User presented with Deposit Information and final approval button:
I didn’t realize it cost five bucks each to open all of these accounts. I got the impression from the first screen that it would cost only five bucks total. No big deal, I’ll simply back up and un-select all but one account. But here’s where I ran into an issue that made me have to start over from the beginning: I could only back up three screens, to the funding selection screen:
There is no way to back up before the Funding Selection screen. The user has to abandon the process and start over. Again, not a big deal, and probably an oversight somewhere. Still, I can’t imagine this doesn’t cause at least a small amount of form-abandonment.
There are also a few CSS issues here and there that tell me the UI designer did not conduct sufficient cross-browser testing, issues like these:
Overall, except for the password limitation, I don’t think any of this is terrible. Although these sorts of issues would be unforgivable in a national bank like Wells Fargo (the bank I’m leaving), SFFCU is a local Credit Union and they probably do not have the resources to conduct any user testing of their UI. But I think they should find a way. User testing is important. Sometimes it can suss out issues.
Regardless, I’m now an SFFCU account holder. I’m hoping I’ll be a happy one. I never had any issues with Wells – their Haight branch is super friendly and I like the convenience of them being so close by. But it’s time to put my money where my mouth is and support a local business.
UPDATE
I was sent a PDF of a signature card to fax in. I printed it out on my scanner/printer, filled it out, scanned it back into the scanner/printer, and emailed the PDF.
A short time later, I got an email back saying,
HI Tim,
Please fax it to us or send it. For security reasons, I cannot except a scanned emailed version of your signature card for any emailed membership information can be intercepted. Please fax to 41-674-4691 or send to: 3201 California Street San Francisco, CA 94118.
Thank you,
This is hilarious!
It’s 2011. I haven’t seen a fax machine in almost a decade and it’s been well over a decade since I’ve used one. Does anyone still send Faxes? We have email now!  Email is better. The resolution is limitless. It’s in color. It doesn’t use paper unless you tell it to. Fax machines were a plague and we are good to be rid of them.
The part about intercepting an attachment is interesting. I suppose it is possible if the email is going from a POP-account to another POP-account and you had one of the servers in between, AND if you knew when the email was going to be sent, AND if you could man-in-the-middle the files, alter them, and send them on quickly (a lot of if’s). But  a gmail attachment?  gmail has never had an interception. When gmail is proven to be insecure, it will be on the front page of the New York Times.
I suppose I can go through the trouble of signing up for an efax account and go through exactly the same process: emailing efax my document and having efax send the fax machine a fax of my document. But efax charges to send faxes.
I considered asking her to print out the email, walk it over to the fax machine and drop it in the received tray, but I doubt she would get my pithy humor. Also, I don’t like to mock underlings for dumb decisions by management. Often these security rules are industry best-practices and are just part of the institution.
I think the best way to handle this will be to rely on snail mail. It’s half a buck and a trip down to the mail box and I guess I could use the exercise. I’ll grab a latte on the way back.
UPDATE #2
I just got a call from a very nice lady who told me that they can, in fact, accept my signature card by email. She called me, on a Sunday night no less, to tell me not to go through the trouble of snail-mailing my card in.
WOW!
I have been a member of this bank for less than 6 hours and I’m already loving them!
I will be turning up the heat on my friends to jump ship from their to0-big-to-fail banks.
Convio is massively sophisticated PaaS (Platform as a Service) and offers hundreds of features for organizations to administer their membership. Just about every big organization with a big membership uses Convio.
During my stint as Webmaster for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we used Convio to email newsletters and “asks” (solicitations for donations), membership services (petition drives, mostly) and selling tickets to events, among other things. We used Convio but we didn’t like it. The mere mention of “Convio” would produce scowls or cringes among those who had to use it, none bigger than on the face of the Executive Director who didn’t like writing massive yearly checks to Convio.
My own experience with Convio centered around creating custom event web pages (example) on the Convio site using a mix of HTML, CSS, PHP and the Convio markup language. Sounds simple, right? It wasn’t. The system for creating custom pages was labyrinthine at best. What I could easily do in an hour or two in Drupal would take me all day to do in Convio. The whole system was downright bizarre and unintuitive.
I came to think of Convio as similar to chemotherapy. It’s got a time and a place, but it’s difficult to endure and it makes your hair fall out.
Then I came across Nationbuilder, when my colleague Jim Ross wanted a new site with membership administration and he wanted it built on the Nationbuilder platform. Once I dove in, I could not believe how easy it was to use. Social media integration was flawless. Custom page templates were as easy as WordPress theming, easier even than Drupal theming. Adding members-only custom content is a breeze.
If you’ve got money to burn and you’ve already learned how to use these tools, you might not want to switch. Otherwise, NationBuilder is an elegant replacement for these outdated donor management software suites. Our social CRM is designed to help you conduct donor outreach, interaction and contact logging from social media to phone and in-person contact, with rich analytics. You can print call sheets and download lists or your entire donor database easily.
This is ridiculously understated. After using Nationbuilder for a week, I could not understand why anyone would still use Convio. After another two projects (example), I can’t believe people are not abandoning Convio like a burning warehouse and sprinting to Nationbuilder.
The plusses are that there is much more space for titles in the streaming list. I can read the whole story without guessing what the story might be. I hate not knowing what the story is when I am building my playlist. This solves it.
I took space away from the “now playing” box. It’s useless, wasted space.
With this layout, there is more space for the sponsorship image.
Something to consider – the box at the bottom can probably be dispensed with, unless NPR has user data that says that area is used by users.
Imagine you have to go the bathroom really bad. You are walking and see this sign at the end of the all. Glance at it quickly. Do you go right or left?
I went right. Obiously, the arrow is right below Restroom—immediately adjacent, almost touching—so it must be to the right, right? No. It’s to the left. This is the sort of sign you have to read from top to bottom to understand.
If the person doing the letters had put one empty panel between the arrow and the word Restroom, this would not be confusing.
