The National Australia Bank, who have decided to follow KFC’s lead in turning themselves into an acronym (yes I know KFC is only an abbreviation), have also decided that confusing their internet banking customers is also a good idea.

On their homepage the links to internet banking & online trading has been moved from a large bold link up the top of the page to the right side of the page in small font. Why this was done is a mystery to me. It doesn’t really affect me, as my eyesight is fine and I’m fairly comfortable with navigating web pages. However, for the less web-savvy and those with poor eyesight it’ll be making things just that little bit more difficult. Sure, it’s not a big issue, but why make it more difficult than it needs to be. Remember the user’s mantra is “Don’t make me think!“. And making internet banking harder to find will just push more people into the branches, which is something all banks are desperately trying to avoid. I can only think that it has been moved for design reasons, that is, their designer (or agency as I assume it will be) has come up with a design that has the login box over there. It really is a strange decision, becuase as this eyetrack heatmap study shows, the top-right position is possibly the worst place to put anything as it’s the last place people look on a page.

In addition to this, in Firefox the little ‘add to favourites’, ‘advanced search’, ‘change text size’, etc. buttons up the top-right have no tool tips, and therefore no explanation as to what they do. This is simply because they’ve used the alt tag to create the tool tips instead of the title tag. Unfortunately, only Internet Explorer turns all alt tags into tool tips. Of course IE doesn’t have it all it’s own way. In Internet Explorer, if the text size is set to ‘medium’, it looks like this. What is particularly odd is that I can change the font size up and it scales fine, and down & it’s also fine. It’s only on medium, which I assume most people would have it set to, that it breaks. Does anyone else see this problem or is it just my computer? I can’t believe that anyone would let this occur without testing it in IE on medium text size. One other odd thing is that the homepage is a fixed-width layout which fits exactly into an 800px width browser, while every other page I’ve checked is has a liquid middle column layout that is just a little bit too wide and forces a horizontal scrollbar at 800×600 resolution.

However, the one thing that actually prompted me to have a closer look into NAB’s website design is the fact that when you click on the internet banking link from the homepage, while the popup is loading (it’s a whole-page popup which conceals the page underneath) the homepage redirects to this promotion about SMS alerts. That has got be confusing to the average user, they log on to do their banking and once they’re finished, suddenly they’re not where they left off.

The NAB site is a fairly easy to use site in general, especially for a banking site with so much information. You can get to most pages within one or two clicks and the info is fairly well laid out. It’s a pity that it’s being let down by just a few, but glaring, useability problems.

[tags]nab, national australia bank, web design, banks, useability, cross-browser[/tags]