“Many people who encounter problems with a site tend to blame themselves and not the site.” This insight is just one of the many reasons I love the work of Steve Krug, whose book Don’t Make Me Think! opened my eyes to the concept of usability.
In my previous post, I set out the problems I had with Nationwide’s internet banking. In brief: it took me six months to get to the point where I could actually log in and do something with my own money. What I tried to do then was to transfer money into the HSBC account I share with my husband, so that we could pay our (Nationwide) mortgage. As my previous post makes clear, this proved impossible because Nationwide required me to use a card reader to carry out the transfer, and the card reader didn’t work.
Just over a year ago, I took what I thought was my first step towards more ethical banking: I opened a Nationwide current account. Before I opened the account, I made sure to ask about the internet banking. Did it work? Was it straightforward? Easy online banking was one of the few things I liked about my old HSBC account, and I wanted to be sure Nationwide would offer the same thing. I was assured that Nationwide’s internet banking was very easy to use and naively, I believed it.