This Is Broken...

 

There's a great site called www.thisisbroken.com where people submit examples of things that were designed from a perspective other than the customer. It makes you think about how to make things as easy as possible. I've been a Netbank customer for about 6-7 years now and it's been a great experience.

They recently instituted a "state-of-the-art security"system. You have the usual username/password, but now a series of questions/answers. You pick 5 of them and you need 1, usually, to log-on each time you want to transact with the bank.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate security as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure this is the best way to do it.
Why? Well, if you look at the questions, you'll see a lot of them are opinions, not facts. That's for starters.

For example: what's your favorite song? Well, whatever it is now, it's not the same as it was 2 years ago (or maybe even last week)

And the facts questions....there are some problems there as well.

For example: what was the first/last name of the person you took to the senior prom?
Ok, so I took Stephanie Heideman (obviously I didn't select that question), but is it:

• Stephanie Heideman
• stephanie Heideman
• Stephanie heideman
• stephanie heideman
• StephanieHeideman
• stephanieHeideman
• Stephanieheideman
• stephanieheideman

You think in 2 months I'm going to remember which one of these I used? [I hope she doesn't google herself today :-).]

I ran into this problem today with the "which team do you like to see lose?"

Well, there are a few and I guess I forgot which one I chose (it may have been baseball season when I answered and now my frame of reference is football).

I had to call and re-set my password. Annoying

This is a comprehensive security system, but I'm not sure it is the most customer-centric way of doing it.
I've seen some other (more graphical) security systems pop up, which have some promise.

(and, to top it all off...when I try to pay my e-Bill at 2.15am...the service is down!)

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2006
  I got home from work this PM to try and log on to NetBank and pay my bill...a process which 12 hours

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2006
  The comment has been removed