Pay bill, confirm
Why is it that with online bill payment systems, the bigger, more bureaucratic the organization, the worse the user experience when I want to give them my money? Isn’t that counterintuitive?
Call me old-fashioned, but I like to keep tabs on how much I’m spending on utilities by manually paying online every month (as opposed to setting up automatic payments). So I’ve had to grow accustomed to a variety of bill paying models.
Without a doubt, the most frictionless is SoCal Gas Company.
I click the link in the email, log in with 1Password, my bank info is already in the system, I click Make Payment and then Confirm, and I’m done. It’s not pretty, but it’s simple, straightforward and it knows who I am.
Above, you see Time Warner Cable, who provides my TV and Internet. They put some money into making it a little prettier, with custom iPhone-style buttons. But then, there are things like dropdown menus with custom interaction that won’t drop down unless you click the disclosure arrow. It gets me every time. And then I have to navigate through three menus to tell it how I want to pay. And worst yet, it doesn’t retain my bank info, so I have to enter that every time, from memory.
And this a brief tangent, but what’s the deal with making a user enter the same account number or email address TWICE? Does that add extra security? No, because if you’re like me, you copy from the first field and paste into the second field. Do most users actually enter then number twice manually, and then, on the off-chance they’ve made a clerical error, even notice that the two long strings of numbers don’t match? That’s pure idiocy, and I’m certain that whatever UX designers include that only do so because they’ve seen it on other sites.
But the worst worst offender (it should come as no surprise) is my health insurance provider, Blue Shield of California. Until a few months ago, they didn’t even have an online bill payment system. I’d literally call customer service every month and give the rep my credit card number. Then, finally, the fire under their ass got hot enough that they built one. And I went to use it. And it was UNUSABLE. Didn’t seem to know who I was, or what to do with me, even thought I’d made an online account and everything. So I called customer support and they told me, “Yeah, we’re getting a lot of calls like this. You probably shouldn’t use that yet because it’s got a lot of problems.”
I feel like a kid who walks into a store holding a wad of cash and none of the sales people want to help me. It’s 2010, and the web should not feel like that.
