Bank of Ireland’s big broadcast of a small fix — good or bad?
– posted February 6th, 2008 by Brian Donohue No comments
Bank of Ireland have a bit of an odd habit — when you log in to your banking account, they frequently bring you to a splash page with a notice of something that’s usually useless, like FRAUDULENT EMAIL ALERT. It’s good fodder for our Writing for the Web class, but otherwise it’s just a page to quickly click “Proceed” from.
But recently, BoI introduced a different sort of an announcement:
This was a big change from their usual announcements. Based on feedback from our Web Writing training sessions, I doubt many people bother to read announcements like these:
But I did read their new one. Why? Well because it had nice images to draw my eye, plus a nice header that seemed important. And my initial reaction was, Wihoo!
You see, a month or two ago, they switched from letting you type in your PIN number to making you select the digits from a dropdown list. So this is doubly annoying, because not only have they chosen the wrong interaction, but they moved from the right one to the wrong one.
And now they’re moving back!
I was genuinely happy.
But then I wondered — this is really a very small detail. Like all user interface details, they’re critical in the quality of the experience, but they’re not the sort of changes websites usually alert their users to.
But hey, at least I know they’re trying to make the small little improvements that really make a difference — I know that BoI is genuinely trying to make their website better.
What do you think — good promotion of website improvements, or overkill?
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