Okay, I rant about this one all the time and I’ve sent Citibank a million emails about it, but I find it one of the most offensive customer experience issues in my daily web usage. I’m thinking of closing my account because of it. What is causing my outrage?

The above screen appears on the Citibank website EVERY TIME a customer tries to do anything beyond looking at their balances. Today, I added a new payee to my billpay. Well, before I could pay the new payee, I have to give Citibank my ATM number and my mother’s maiden name. I have no problem with a little extra security, but asking for the ATM number makes no sense. What does it have to do with their website? I’m not at an ATM machine. I often don’t even have my ATM with me when I log into my account. It’s in my wallet downstairs while I’m in my office or buried deep inside my suitcase. So I have to get up and get my wallet just to access my account. Crazy, but true. I have accounts at Wachovia, Sovereign, Key, Northern Federal, Vanguard, Fidelity, and ING Direct. I have never been asked for my ATM number at any of these financial institutions — except for Citibank.

The FIX: Stop annoying customers and use a customer-selected image or other security measure that real people would remember (better yet recall in the case of the customer-selected image), instead of asking for information that a) no one memorizes and b) is often not readily available.

I mentioned that I have emailed Citibank several times about this screen. What was their response? They were kind enough to tell me that that’s the way it is and it was for my security. Security is great, but if you are regularly keeping out the owner of the account, then that’s too secure.

I love trying new restaurants. After reading or hearing about a restaurant, I google it to see what other folks are saying about the food, how much it costs, what’s currently on the menu, etc. I’m sure you do the same.

Today, I checked out Govinda’s Vegetarian Restaurant in Philadelphia. The website is not cutting edge, but it provided the basic info (address, menu, hours, location, etc) that I needed. But then I went to the menu page…

The first UX no-no was that the menu is only available as a pdf download. That’s great if a customer wants to print it out, but I just wanted to check out what Govinda’s serves for dinner and I didn’t want to download a document or worry about having an updated version of Adobe to read it.

The FIX: Put the menu in plain HTML text. It makes it easier for your customers to read AND gives search engines something to index. Sure search engines can index a pdf, but that’s probably not the part of your site that you want popping up at the top of a search for your restaurant.

Next UX no-no was the ads. I have no problem with businesses having ads on their site, but why put them front and center on your pages when your primary business isn’t selling ads? Do you want customers coming to your restaurant or clicking on ads that send them away from your site? You probably want customer coming to your restaurant.

The FIX: If you want to have ads on your site, make sure they are placed so they don’t distract from your real goal: selling your services.

Examples:

Usability process planning. I’ve often had to come up with a process for incorporating user research into the existing design and development cycles within the companies I’ve worked. Here are some flows I put together to help communicate the steps that are needed to complete user research.

The standard usability plan
A plan for regular monthly user testing
Tips for conducting guerrilla usability in public places

Test results – I do two types of reports after completing a user study: a quick result and a more detailed report.

Quick results for search project
Another Quick results for a desktop security suite
Detailed findings report for a customer account management site

Analysis of Customer comments and feedback form submissions. Often sifting through website feedback and surveys is the last thing UX folks have time to do, but it often really highlights problems that are often not seen via other tools.

Voice of the customer report

Heuristic Evaluations/Expert Reviews. I do these all the time. In fact, I have a side business where I help identify areas on websites, mobile apps and software that need improvement. Often they are ideal for companies who don’t have UX folks on staff and don’t have the time or budget for user research.

Expert review of a freelance writer’s website (large file!)
Expert review of a financial section of a website

Please note that some of these examples have been saved in gif format to ensure that anyone with a web browser can view them.

Wireframes
Complex shopping flow
Beneficiary project wireframe (you may need to click on the image to make it display full size in your browser)
IRA rollover project (originally done in Visio, but saved as a gif)
Phone associate processing “homepage”

Flow diagrams
Beneficiary project
Check/wire flow
Complex financial transaction flow

Thinking diagrams — I use these to try to understand how real people see complex problems. I do them mainly for myself, but I have also used them to get certain points across to people on my project teams.
User problem maps (how users see the world and how it overlaps with how company sees world)
Education and Advice from a user perspective
How one area of site affects other areas

Personas
Penelope (pdf)
Sharon (pdf)

Concepts – I often put lots of conceptual designs in my early wireframes. I like them because they help others on the team envision how we can better serve customers, if not now, then in the future.
A new way to select mutual fund mixes
A new homepage concept

One of the most difficult problems users faced with managing their accounts was that from a company perspective their is a billing account and a set of users on that account who can manage various aspects of their services. So one person may pay the bill and others in the household were viewed a sub-users who could manage various aspects of the services they personally used (email accounts, dvr programming, online viewing, voice mail, etc) based on permissions granted by the account owner. This caused much confusion for users.

I was tasked with working on a new experience and with testing the experience with real users.

Here is the usability report (large file!) that depicts what worked and what didn’t and has screen grabs of various designs.

My team was asked to make ordering online much easier. Looking over the screens and the back end systems that support them, we knew that several small fixes would greatly improve our customers ability to successfully order services. We also saw major challenges that would require us to rethink both the front and backend to better support customer needs.

We are still regularly releasing new functionality and designing this project, but already we have doubled the amount of orders completed online.

Here are a set of wireframes from that project.

I was asked to be the lead UX person on the new site AFTER it was initially conceived, designed and built by an outside agency. I came in, asked some hard questions, and started turning the site into a true social media site. We added video sharing tools, polls, user profiles, badges, artist spotlights and more. We even helped launch a restaurant in New York’s Times Square, called Spotlight, where guests were recorded singing songs that were broadcast live on Ziddio and on a huge screen outside the restaurant.

Over the next year, the site’s user base grew to over 100,000 registered users, but by 2007, Youtube and several other online video sharing sites had emerged, several offering advanced contest tools, and Comcast decided to no longer compete in the space.

Ziddio was one of my favorite experiences in my career.

In our research we found that help sites were great for very general, common issues like finding out how to reset a password, but were not very helpful when a problem was more specific, like finding out what to do when your dvr would no longer record. Often very specific user problems were better handled by forums powered by other users.

In our designs we “bubbled up” the most viewed content as well as surfaced up the most active forum threads. We also made the site more aware of the services and history of the user seeking help. There was no need to show TV content if the customer only had Internet service, for example.

When we tested our concepts, we learned that users didn’t immediately gravitate to the Comcast help site. They first entered terms into Google. The first site they encountered that had the answer to their question was good enough. Surprisingly, Comcast’s own help pages weren’t ranking very highly in Google. So we immediately did an entire SEO overhaul of the site.