HSBC Online Banking Upgrade — A plea to avoid disaster

NB — I don’t usually moan for this post is very grumpy so unless you’re an interested party I’d probably move along to happier pastures. Apologies =)

As a customer of HSBC for 25 years and a Premier customer for the last 10, I have a strong loyalty with the service — moving bank seems like a very personal decision.

Only until this week have I ever considered it and that is due to the atrocious user experience of their new online banking. A regression doesn’t even cover it — it is quite frankly not fit for use… here are my “show stopping issues” identified on the blanked out screenshots below…

1. Unordered and unidentifiable accounts listing

The first thing I have trouble with is knowing which is which of the six accounts I have with HSBC — savings, joint accounts, credit cards and current accounts.

• Names of account holders are not shown therefore I don’t know the accounts
• Unable to distinguish between credit cards and bank accounts
• The order of Savings > Current > Credit Cards has been lost. I’m not sure how they are ordered now. Certainly not by anything meaningful as the top one is an account I’ve never used.

Without knowing I have to memorise the bank account numbers. I have done this so can navigate but this causes friction as I wouldn’t usually navigate this way. I also can’t see all my accounts so wonder if my credit card is located somewhere else — nope it’s beyond the scroll at the bottom. More on this later.

2. Transaction viewer shows only 4 transactions and merges credits/debits

The second issue I find is an inability to see my transactions. I’m probably doing 5–10 transactions per day with contactless.

• I only see 4 transactions so have to scroll, click “Show more” and scroll
• Credits and debits are merged into a single column so I can’t really see income and outgoings without a magnifying glass to see the minus signs

These two are a complete deal breaker — I use HSBC for TRANSACTIONAL BANKING and yet I cannot see my transactions clearly. This should be the pride and joy of the online banking experience but it’s crammed into a little portlet.

3. Double scrolling — accounts scrolls the page

I find the picture — of Hong Kong? — almost comical. Why when I’m logging into my HSBC UK Current account in a drizzly London do I want to see Hong Kong? But to keep it static while I scroll creates a confusing parallax motion between the content I’m scrolling for — my precious banking information — and the “lovely” stock image behind.

Then the final niggle — which just shows the quality of the user testing to me — when I scroll through the six accounts and get the bottom the list the page suddenly starts to scroll. With gamer-like reflexes I can just about coordinate catching the link but I would wager many fight with that.

The 1990s portlet design really isn’t easy to follow as sadly it removes any hierarchy of the page. Perhaps the technology team decided to use microservices in the UI but didn’t read about how do it — who knows.

Oh, and waiting for the spinner loading the page — argh! I must stop here.

Final remarks…

I would urge HSBC’s team to allow users to take it slow and allow those who wish (such as me) to continue to use the old (far superior) service.

The simple change is this: when I log back in take me to whichever service I logged out from. I can tell you this will be the old one for me — I’ll keep looking at the new one and I will adopt it when it’s ready.

If I get forced into the new service I will give it probably 60 (maybe 90!) days and then I’m off to go somewhere else…