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Fit for Purpose? An experience in poor user testing
I love online banking and its adoption by
banks has given me and almost everybody else the facility to manage
their accounts more effectively, and if you are anything like me, that was
something I had totally neglected in the past.I wonder sometime however as to how many
humans actually test these systems, as reflected in my recent experience of using
HSBC’s messaging system (no more phoning call centres for me!). This system
allows you to send a secure ‘email’ to their customer support service which I
used to try and send a simple message along the lines of the following:Hi,
A few
days ago I transferred £82 from my current account to my VISA account to pay my
credit card bill, but it still hasn’t appeared – is there a problem?Regards
On pressing ‘Send’ however, I got an error
message along the lines of:It was not possible to send your
message because of an illegal character: ‘?’Rather strange, I thought not to allow
question marks in a messaging system primarily designed to send questions, but
I went back – edited the message to remove the question mark, pressed ‘Send’,
but again got the same error message. Obviously there was something in the
message which the system did not like, but there were no more question marks in
the message. By process of elimination, I worked out that it was actually the £
sign which was incompatible with their message processing system and by
substituting this with GBP, I was able to send the message.I do a lot of testing work at Precedent on
projects that we develop and also assist on some of the technical testing for
the Porter Research Reports, so come across all sorts of problems on a day to
day basis, but you would think that a large organisation such as HSBC, who I’m
sure do extensive testing on any module before it is deployed would actually
have considered that this particular system might just be used to discuss
financial transactions which in the UK invariable are done in £s and that even as part of the specification of the system, they would have defined which characters would be deemed illegal - but there again, perhaps not?
