Friday, January 30, 2015

Does citibank have the worst website?

I've used a handful of banking/credit card websites, and I have to say of them all, Citibank's by far the worst of them all. They are the Comcast of banking websites.

I logged into my business credit card account to try and get the yearly total interest. I can not find this information anywhere on the website. So I am guessing it might be included on the statements. Unlike every other website which usually give you the last 24 months of statements instantly available, Citibank makes you request a statement which then may take as long as 48 hours to be available.

Are they running their website off of floppies and a commodore 64?

And to make it just a little more unpleasant, their request form, which consists of nothing more than 2 drop downs and a submit button, doesn't work in chrome. I mean, requesting pdf statements is I think pretty basic functionality. The fact that it doesn't work in one of the most popular browsers is not a good sign.

But don't worry. Citibank has a plan to keep you happy. You see, if you go to their contact form to let them know what you think of their lackluster website, you get to play a guessing game. You get to guess which character that you entered in the form is the special character they don't like in the form. And when you go back to the form, you get to fill out the whole form all over again because it all gets wiped out. Isn't that fun?

**spoiler alert** the special character (one of them anyhow) is the single quote. Apparently the single quote is not considered standard punctuation according to Citibank. I guess they frown on contractions. I mean they allow you a whole 20 lines of text so I guess there's no excuse for contractions.

A single quote can be used in a special type of website hacking attempt. However, if handled properly the single quote is not a problem. Telling people to re-write their message is not handling it properly. Hell, they could just remove the single quote on their end, which is still not the right way to do it and would still be a much better way to handle it then the way they are handling it now.

As far as I can tell, they've basically done zero usability testing to see if the website is user friendly. And it's functionally poorly implemented. It's pretty astonishing that a bank as large as Citibank can't manage to put up a better website.

2 comments:

claudia said...

yes it does. I googled it and people are complaining. There different urls where you can enter your log in info, but in all of them you receive and error. I tried using google chrome, safari and internet explorer. I just want to pay my credit card. Maybe they do not want me to.
Also I tried to have automatic payments. Try to go to "manage autopay". It seems it didn't acknowledge my request.

MsValdes said...

Yes. Citibank has the worst website. I wanted to tell them, but the only way to contact them was by regular mail.