I use Bank Of Ireland a lot. I have my personal and business bank with them but today after losing nearly 2 hours, in trying to log on to their business banking service frustration was showing!
For those of you who use their online banking service for your personal accounts, there is no comparison with Business Online. The process to get set up is a whole lot more complicated, and then you have a whole bunch of passwords and user id’s to keep track off.
After trying to log in today, and failing 3 times thus locking my account, I had to pick up the phone to their customer service department. They very kindly reset my Admin password and gave me the details. It’s up to you to change your password after logging in. So, after searching around I came up with my new passwords which involved a combination of Alpha Numerics and special characters as any good strong password should have. The password was 8 characters long, but the app kept telling me that passwords less than 8 were not allowed. Fair enough, this is a pain, but I appended a character to it to make it BOI’s definition of 8 characters.
Logged in, tried to log back in no joy and locked myself out again! After a phone call back to clarify things it turns out the password cannot contain any special characters (#,$ % etc.). But how does the application deal with this? It just ignores the character in your password field and just informs you the password is too short! Something like “Your password should not contains special characters” never appears. The special character is simply removed from your password, but you’re not told about it! Customer Service nicely pointed out that this information is in the support docs had I bothered to read it!
I teach UI design to my class in College, and one of the key mantras is “Put the User in Control”. This is a typical example of taking that control away from the user and costing people time and money with bad UI design.