General bad website thread

[Blue Mountain]

More than once I've ranted on about bad websites, often as not interrupting threads instead of putting them into a more appropriate place. So it seems fit to have a thread where people can post about their bad experiences on web sites.

Today's bad site: InvestorOnline, by CI Investments.

Overall the site is good: well laid out, nice and fast, no horrible JavaScript requirements. But, as you can see from the feedback I posted, all is not well.

When providing answers to security questions, at one point I supplied an answer similar to "Sackville-Baggins". Upon clicking Submit, the site responded with (paraphrased) "One of the answers to the security questions did not meet our requirements." The page gave no indication which answer failed, nor did it indicate the nature of the failure.

On my own I figured out it was the dash in "Sackville-Baggins" that was the problem and changed it to ""SackvilleBaggins".

My comments.

1. If there was text on the page saying only alphabetic characters were acceptable, I missed it. I'm a very experienced web user and know how web forms work, so I simply skipped over any explanatory text and jumped to the questions and answers.

2. My answer to the question is now wrong because I couldn't enter the correct answer.

3. I've been programming computers for 35 years. There is no reason from a technical point of view that the dash should cause problems. I understand, however, from a UX point of view special characters may be undesirable (e.g. user enters an nonsense answer such as "#&$(^)!!" that likely cannot be remembered in the future.)

4. In my opinion, for the site to refuse an answer with no explanation as to why is a failure of your QA people. This should have been caught in testing well before it went online.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Heh. When I saw the thread title I came in to complain about another investment site. Earlier this summer my former company spun off some of its investment work to Charles Schwab. I haven't been there long enough to judge them as an investment company, but their website sucks-- it's obviously built and formatted for mobile phone users. Call me crazy, but when I'm messing around with my money I don't want to play on my phone. I'm not a teenager depositing his Hardee's paycheck, I'm a goddamn adult with vast riches; I want a nice big screen I can copy/paste from into my tracking spreadsheets, and navigate around like it's an actual website and not a "app".

In fact, I hate the Charles Schwab investor web navigation so much I'm moving all my money elsewhere. CS clearly doesn't take itself seriously so why should I?