Dan Weese's Blog

 

The User Experience of Bank of America #ux

A few months ago I got divorced. One of the to-do's of any divorce is to take any joint bank accounts and remove one of the names. So, with my divorce paperwork in hand, I went down to my local Bank of America branch. I asked them how to go about removing my ex-wife from my checking account. They told me that she would have to go into her local branch and have her name taken off. Ok, no problem. How hard could that be?

 

So, I called my ex and asked her to go to the bank. A couple days later she was able to get to the bank, however, when she got there they told her that I had to be with her in order for her to take her own name off my bank account. Seriously? What's even more ridiculous is they told her she could close the account and clean out every red cent in there without my signature, but in order to leave the bank account intact I had to be there. Perfect. You can close an account with more than one person on it, but you can't remove your name from that same account. That makes sense.

 

It turns out that the reason they need both parties in the branch at the same time is they say the remaining person has to sign a new signature card with only their name on it. Welcome to 2011.

 

So, about a week goes by before my schedule and my ex-wife's schedule line up so we can meet at the bank. We walk in, and after a 30 minute wait, someone is finally available to help us. They ask for her drivers license and my check card. After a phone call to the Online Banking department to make sure they can remove her name without crashing any online banking stuff, they remove her name from the account. I sat and waited for them to hand me a signature card so I could give them an updated signature. It never happened. They said the process was complete and we could go ahead and leave. What? I don't have to sign anything? She doesn't have to sign anything? Why exactly did we both have to be here?

 

Epic FAIL. What if you and your ex aren't on good terms? I suppose the only thing you can do is open a new checking account, have your direct deposit changed over through your employer, start paying bills out of the new account as you deposit money until you can totally switch without missing any bill payments. If I'm going to go through all that, I'm switching banks. Thankfully, my ex and I are still friends so it was just a 2 week pain in the ass to accomplish.

 

Bank of America needs to change their policies. #1, if I have a court document that says checking account number 12345 belongs to me and my ex will no longer have access to it, that should be enough for Bank of America to remove her name. It's a legal document signed by a judge. #2, if that doesn't do, the person needing to be removed should be able to do it by themselves. #3, you shouldn't be able to close a joint bank account without the other person signing something. That just doesn't make sense.

Posted June 5, 2011
 

Redesigning an internal tool that doesn't generate revenue

Revenue generating applications are what usually get any design time. Internal applications are left to suffer the result of quick coding and implementation. The UI is the LAST thing people usually concern themselves with when developing internal apps. Why?

  1. They don't generate revenue
  2. Our customers won't see it so just whip something up that gets the job done

Well, guess what? Your fellow employees are now your customers if you're creating an application for them.

 

Think about it: You're creating a tool for them to use because there is some process, workflow or task in their daily work that is in dire need of streamlining. If there wasn't, you wouldn't be making the app in the first place, right? So, you sit down with them, hear their gripes about how they currently do things and come up with a way you can make it better and faster. Just because they're not buying the application from you doesn't make them any less of a customer. If anything, it's more important you do a good job on this app because if you don't, the person bitching about it is 3 cubicles away, not 500 miles away at some random customer site. If you screw this up, you've got to deal with it on a personal level every single day. For most developers, once an app gets deployed to a customer, the complaint department is handled by the Tech Support team, not the people that wrote it. Out of sight, out of mind.

 

This brings me around to my own company. We have an internal application used to generate license files for our commercial software products. To boil it down, it sucks. Really sucks. From a developer perspective, it does exactly what it's supposed to. It creates licenses. What it doesn't do is create them gracefully. The process is as follows:

  1. The Admin for the Sales team goes into Microsoft Excel, enters in a bunch of information about the customer into a form-like spreadsheet, then presses a button at the bottom of the form. That button executes a macro that takes the information from the spreadsheet and converts it to an XML output file that then gets saved out to a specific location on the file server.
  2. The Admin then sends an email to a Tech Support person letting them know a new spreadsheet file has been generated.
  3. The Tech Support rep goes into the spreadsheet and through a macro, exports the information out to an XML file on the file server.
  4. The Tech Support person opens up the License Manager application and goes through a series of menu options to import the newly created XML file.
  5. The XML file gets imported into the application and creates individual lines for each component, role, work status and product the customer has paid for.

It's worth noting here that each time Customer ABC calls us to add a user or buy a new component, a NEW Excel spreadsheet is generated that reflects that specific purchase. That results in creation not of a master license file that encompasses the entirety of the license for that product, but an Add-On license file that will append itself to the existing license. I bring that up because the end result is you could have a dozen individual license files that make up the total license count. In order for you to get a count of what the customer should have, you have to open all the individual spreadsheets, add them up and get the total count manually. The other way around this is to create a master license every time so there's only one, which is what we're doing now because it became too difficult to get information the other way. OK, now back to the steps. We're not finished.

  1. The Tech Support person validates the data that was imported into the License Manager application and compares it to the detail information the Sales Admin included in her email.
  2. Once everything is correct, the Tech Support rep exports the license file to a specific location on the file server.
  3. The Support rep then sends an email to the Support Coordinator letting her know there is a new license file ready to be sent to a customer.
  4. The Support Coordinator creates an email to the customer, attaches the license file and sends it to the customer with specific instructions on how to install it themselves. Sometimes, they can't figure it out and have to call us to do it for them.

All of that to create ONE license file. We generate 10 or more every week, so multiply that process and you'll have a pretty good idea that there's room for improvement.

 

So, I'm turning this process on its ear. There has got to be a better way.

 

Stay tuned.

Posted April 15, 2011
 

A Much Needed Kick in the Pants

I created this blog a while back because I had things to say. Not to any specific people, but more as an exercise for myself, and if anyone stumbled across it and got even one little tidbit out of it, I'd consider it a success.

 

But, over time, life takes over and of all the things going on in my world, blogging was pretty much at the bottom of the list. Watching TV was 2nd from the bottom, but if I ever had enough minutes in the day to make it that far down the list, I'd veg in front of the TV before I'd do something productive and personally rewarding like blogging.

 

Then, today I read an article from Jason Cohen called Attacking your sucky excuses for not blogging. In it, he discusses all the excuses people use for not blogging. The biggest of all, and one that I suffer from personally is the excuse of "I don't know what to write about". He also directs people over to Virtual Impax and their excellent article on Unseen Business Killers. That article references my other best excuse for not blogging: "I don't have time to blog". I suffer from "time poverty", or at least it feels like I do. In reality, there are probably plenty of moments in my week that could benefit from better time management.

 

So, between Jason's article and the one from Virtual Impax, I have received the kick in the pants I so desperately needed to get back to my blog and not let it stagnate. I'm taking Jason's advice, shamelessly referencing some articles I got a lot out of, and how they relate to me personally. Now I just need to schedule myself an hour a week to work on the blog as Step 1 to getting back in the groove.

Thanks Jason!

Posted April 13, 2011