The Citizens Bank Web site recently added a new feature: bill payees can be put into groups.
When you first visit the “Add/Manage Groups” page, it looks like this:
The first stupid UI decision should be obvious after a moment’s thought. Once you’ve set up your groups, you will rarely if ever create new ones, and yet they’ve put a big “Add Group” box at the top of the page, taking up precious real estate.
Here’s what it looks like when you add your first group and add a payee to it:
Can you see where this is going yet? Let me make it clearer by showing what happens when you’ve created a few more groups and added payees to them:
See it now? As you add groups and assign payees, they move to the top of the page. The list of unassigned payees is forced lower and lower until finally you have to scroll just to get to it, and you have to scroll lower and lower as you assign each one.
This is by far the stupidest UI I’ve seen in quite a long time. It wasn’t uncommon to see stuff like this 10 or 15 years ago when the Web was in its infancy, but it’s difficult to imagine how something like this could end up being designed, implemented, and released by a large corporation like Citizens Bank, which presumably has the money to pay for decent UI engineers and people who know how to do usability testing.
Oh, and by the way, when you click on the “Delete Group” link for a group, it’s just gone, with no confirmation. Sheesh!
