Aral Balkan: Historical Archive — Usability annoyance of the day

Usability annoyance of the day

I found myself on the Cooperative bank's online banking site today, pulling my hair out. Why, you ask? Well, because some genius decided that the bank should log the user out whenever the Back button is pressed. They even display a message telling you this after logging you out. Then you have to provide your sort number, account number, key code and some personal bit of information before you can get back in, only to be logged out in a few seconds when you forget and hit the Back button again. I swear I did this four times. Whomever designed that interaction should be forced to watch Battlefield Earth non-stop for a week.

Comments

From a security perspective it makes perfect sense, that doesn't excuse them in any way, of course.

I'm still waiting for the first bank to build a nice Flash based banking system.

Don't they realise that people want to be able to do their online banking quickly with minimum fuss.

I have a feeling though online banking is going to be one of the last bastions for click and wait brigade.

I would say Battlefield Earth is to lenient, I'd go the whole hog and say Solaris, the Clooney remake.
by Jolyon on 2005-10-14 12:55:07
As a Co-operative Bank and smile customer I have queried this many times and the reasons they give are: If the back button was enabled and you were to leave your desk even after navigating away from the page someone could sit at your desk use the back button to get into your account and then empty it and navigate you back to the page you were on, by the time you come back you would be non the wiser(and a hell of a lot poorer). Yes the fact they disable the buttons is pants but they do offer buttons on all their pages that allow you to move to any page you should need to. Also they say that they use them to prevent people using browser hijackers, as the page you are on is stored in the session cookie if someone trys to steal your banking session the cookiw ouldnt be present on their machine and therefor they couldnt do anything with it, as I understand you cannot update the session cookie from using the browser navigation buttons.
by Jim on 2006-11-10 10:02:20