The usual suspects: some annoying app designs
Please fix them. User Experience (UX) people. Earn your money.
1. “Enter your username.” No. We never remember them. They’re pointless. Just use my email instead. Nothing else. Preferably not even that. You should just know who I am. From my face. And my history.
2. Banking apps. You are especially terrible. You and credit card apps. Part I: No, I don’t want to “go to the website” to do certain things. The first thing the website will ask me is to use the app. I’ve just come from the app. Make the app do everything the web site does. Please.
3. Banking apps Part II: If you don’t trust me with just a password then forget about passwords. Don’t ask me for a password and then also text me a “One Time” password (OTP) as well.
4. Banking apps Part III: And don’t call it a One Time Password. It’s every #*^%$€* time.
5. This whole ‘text or email me a passcode’ thing: it means that I need a couple of apps running at once, or two browser windows, or two devices. Just rethink the whole thing. Security is just so tedious. We spend more time trying to get into the apps than doing actual banking on the apps. How many Russian or Chinese fraudsters are there, really? You know who they are. You can tell the hoax accounts. It’s not me. As you know.
6. Google maps. When giving me walking instructions, please never, ever say, “Go East” or “Go West”. This is completely useless. I’m not Sir Edmund Hillary. I want to know if I should I go left, or go right, or go straight on, or just turn around.
7. Websites. Do not show me a user experience pop up survey just as soon as I’ve entered your site. I haven’t experienced any experience yet to tell you about my experience. Leave me alone. Also Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are suspect anyway, because we only use the good ones, and we send them to people we know will answer favourably.
8. The multiple log-in options. This one’s a real horrorshow. Confronted with a screen that gives me 4 or 5 different ways to log-in: usually, Google, Apple, Facebook, Outlook and email options. Honestly don’t have time to think or worry about this. Just get me in.
9. Postcode confusion. Nobody is really sure whether the post code field is without spaces or with spaces. I have seen every variation of it, and it slows us down.
10. I am not a robot. But I’m pretty sure a robot can pass your tests.
I know an Artificial Intelligence system, IBM’s Watson, that succeeded in getting through the first few rounds of the MI5 Intelligence Services online application process. There are very powerful techniques within A.I. systems these days that have developed to such a sophisticated degree. Things like pattern recognition, anomaly detection and predictive analytics.
Also Decision Trees are very commonly used in Machine Learning. This is where possible outcomes are listed and a probability of occurrence is attached to them. The outcome value and the probability are multiplied together, to get an ‘Expected Value’. It’s taught in the A Level Business curriculum, and data scientists use it all the time.
11. “Are you registered?” I honestly can’t remember. Then I try to register, and it tells me I’m already registered. Tell me that at the start, please. Detect something – patterns of keyboard behaviour, fingerprints, face, previous activity, my IP address, my device…anything. I don’t mind.
James Neophytou