James's Weblog

As much as I like ING Direct, the 5% interest rate that some other places offer just seems too enticing over ING’s 4.35% interest rate, so I decided to switch.

I first tried to sign up for a savings account with Emigrant Direct, ING’s traditional competitor. I was very unimpressed with their website:

• They use “intelligent” form fields that automatically advance to the next field when you fill up the current one. Although they’re not necessarily bad, Emigrant Direct’s implementation is broken. Making a typo in a field and triggering the automatic advancement has an enormous penalty:
  • Backspace doesn’t work in this model. The form fields automatically advance to the next field but have no automatic means to return to the previous field. The standard method for correcting typos consequently is crippled.
  • Shift+Tab is unusable. Not only is there no automatic way to return to the previous field, but the manual way doesn’t work either. Attempting to use Shift+Tab to return to the previous field retriggers automatic advancement, and you’re stranded where you started.

  Worse, since most of the “intelligent” fields are numeric, typos aren’t uncommon.

  Is it so hard to do this right? If you can’t make something smart, keep it stupid and consistent. Being only half-smart is dangerous.

  Also, the need for automatic advancement can be avoided by abandoning their overly structured form design where, for example, they make you enter your telephone number across three separate fields (area code, first three digits, last four digits) instead of using a single freeform field that they validate later.

• Their session timeouts are too short. Although the online application process is spread over multiple web pages, the form on each page is somewhat lengthy, and they’re full of questions to which I don’t immediately know the answers. Unfortunately, if you spend more than a few minutes figuring out when you last moved or digging up your checkbook, your session times out and all the information that you entered is thrown away and wasted.

If Emigrant Direct wants to make it that troublesome to sign up for an account, it obviously doesn’t want my money, so I went elsewhere. I next tried signing up for Citibank’s e-Savings account. Citibank’s website also suffered from automatically advancing form fields, and at the end of the application process, it offers a confusing procedure to opt out of its mailing lists:

Citibank will periodically send information to you about new products and services … unless you check the box next to your name below. Information about your accounts will continue to be sent to you even if you check the box(es).

Citibank is allowed by law to share with its affiliates any information about its transactions or experiences with you. Please check the box next to your name if you do not want us to share among our affiliates any other information you provide to us….

Financial institutions that want people to trust them with their money should avoid such shady practices that obviously aren’t in the customer’s best interest:

• It’s an opt-out system rather than an opt-in one. Lack of action grants permission. (“If you want me to eat them for you, please give me no sign.”)
• Citibank uses negative instructions.
• Citibank uses inconsistent wording; they use “unless” for one checkbox and use “if you do not” for the other.

I went with Citibank anyway. Sigh.