You’d think that a bank like Scotiabank — a nice, healthy Canadian bank with lots and lots of money — would do a decent job at building, and maintaining, a consistent Web site that gives customers a seamless experience, inspiring trust in the brand.
Yet… in the last two days, I encountered the following little error box several dozen times:
And no, I was not trying to do anything particularly exotic. I was simply trying to make sure that all our retirement savings have consistent renewal instructions.
In the end, I was able to do this but just about every update required 3-4 tries before succeeding.
The new Scotiabank Web site is a mess. For instance, for several days, all investments showed not the actual investment amount but the total of all investments. How such an obvious coding error found its way into a financial institution’s production Web site, I have no clue.
The truly infuriating bit? Scotiabank’s old Web site, though not perfect, worked quite well. Or, I should say, works, because it is still available as a fallback option (there are obviously still some folks with brains and a sense of responsibility there, I suppose.) The new one adds no functionality (in fact, some functionality is reduced/eliminated), it’s all about appearance.
And the updating of renewal instructions? For every single investment, it takes as many as 10 mouse clicks, navigating through three different pages (with plenty of opportunities for the above error box to pop up, necessitating a restart of the process), sometimes with no obvious clue whatsoever that clicking one button is not enough, you then have to click another button at the bottom of the page to complete the task.
Incidentally, both the old and the new interface suffer from another one of those Scotiabank things that I’ve not seen with other banks (maybe because I do not use other banks that often, but still): That shortly after midnight, many of our accounts vanish, sometimes for hours, for “maintenance”.
