This is my biggest gripe: the information layout sucks. I don’t care how pretty your site is—which this one, as we’ve already established, isn’t, so we can’t even give them that much—if it’s not useful, the purpose is entirely defeated. Devastated, even.
Let’s begin with the page you first see when you log in: the account details page. First, all the information is just kind of floating around free-form, with no lines or rules to separate major sections, which gives the whole a chaotic look and doesn’t clearly guide the reader’s eyes where they need to go.
Second, the most important information—my current balance, my latest payment, my credit line, my activity since my last statement, and my next payment due date and required amount—are buried among a bunch of other numbers that I have to wade through to find them. I should be able to see them at a glance, not have to search the page every time. By contrast, you can see that these 6 pieces of information are displayed easily and prominently on the AmEx website; anything else is irrelevant and shouldn’t take pride of place on the main page.
Moving on to the account activity page. This, fair warning, is what makes me most foam-at-the-mouth crazy. At the bottom of the transaction list on the account activity page, one would expect to see your current balance, right? The sum of the transactions made since your last statement, less any payments you’ve made, added to your previous balance. Right? Wrong. Chase apparently thinks you’re only interested in the transaction total: your debits minus your payments, without the context of your previous statement’s balance. Because this piece of information is so useful. To add insult to injury, the previous balance is listed underneath, but the two numbers aren’t added together. I am not kidding. The information is right there, but they can’t be bothered to use it to calculate a number that would be, oh, I don’t know, actually useful to the user.
I mean, Jesus H. What do I care what my current transaction total is? I want to know how much I owe, total. Knowing my current transaction total is meaningless to me. I guess it might be useful if they just added my debits into one number, and left my payments into another number, and then listed the previous balance, because then at least I’d know how much I’d spent since the last statement. Adding in the payments will, nine times out of ten, result in a negative transaction total, and I can’t begin to describe how useless that is.
And you’d think Chase would fix this problem if they knew about it, right? Wrong again. Right at the top of the page, buried at the bottom of a long paragraph of text, and bold-faced but in a low-contrast grey (and what’s the point of that, for god’s sake? Why emphasize and de-emphasize at the same time?), is a disclaimer that the totals at the bottom of the do not reflect your current balance.
Pardon my language, but are you fucking kidding me?! These, ah, people (used in place of a much less complimentary term), first disregard all the basic principles of good information design, and then when a deficiency is pointed out to them, are too lazy to actually fix it and instead post a warning that there is misleading information on the page. Can you believe this? I can’t.
Secondary to that indescribably big problem is that the information in the transaction list itself is very hard to read. The headings aren’t prominent enough, and while zebra-striping on such a large amount of tabular data is de rigeur, it is of course not present here, resulting in an incomprehensible soup of black-on-white-squiggles.
Let us turn, finally, to the view previous statements feature, the cherry on this sundae of pain and discomfort. Previous statements are only available in PDF, and no other format. Not, as you would expect, in a nicely formatted HTML table (which has already proven itself to be beyond the capability of the chase.com designers) with an option to print or download as PDF. Oh, no. You get PDF, or nothing. Meaning you have to have a browser plugin to view your previous statements. Now, there is a way to view your last few statements (though not all) in HTML format, but it is intuitively buried in a pulldown on the account activity page. But that is just the garnish on this melange of misery.
The purpose hasn’t just been defeated; it’s been razed and left a smoking ruin, uninhabitable for centuries to come.