HSBC announce a new UI for their Internet Banking Service

Posted on Tuesday, October 4, 2016 at 3:42 PM into ui, ux, industry, business & branding by Steve Woods.
Roughly a 1 minute read.

This morning HSBC announced that they're going to be launching an updated version of their Personal Internet Banking Service and released a nice accompanying video showing the new interface and functionality.

This pleases me because (in my opinion) the current user interface leaves a lot to be desired in terms of its functionality - it feels dated and disorganised and, more importantly, is difficult to use on a mobile device because it isn't responsive.

Mobile friendly?

Although the video doesn't specifically mention it, I really hope the new version will address this concern and we'll see a nice device-agnostic interface for managing our bank accounts without the need to install a native application.

I feel that if their update fails to address this major issue then there really should be an explanation as to why not - A responsive and fluid interface is a pretty fundamental requirement for a web application nowadays due to the proliferation of mobile and tablet devices, so I really hope they've taken their customer needs into account.

Merged accounts?

Another thing that remains unclear is whether or not you'll continue to need to log in separately to a business account when browsing the personal internet banking, or if they'll be integrated together (much like Barclays Online Banking that my wife has). This would be a fantastic time-saving feature to facilitate confirming money-transfers between a business and personal account for those of us who do this on a regular basis.

Broken back button fixed?

With the current version of the service, on most pages you cannot use the back button - any attempt to do this will result in a security error (presumably because the server is insisting that you follow a specific request path and move page to page). This isn't a hellish problem when using the site, but it does sometimes get annoying when you're (for instance) downloading PDF versions of your statements and have to keep going back to the listing page to download the next months file. Here's hoping (Signed - my book keeper).

Popup hell begone!

Regardless of any of the above though, as long as they solve the popup-hell that occurs with the current version when navigating between both systems, I'll be very happy. Currently the service is an exercise in frustration with numerous windows popping up during the login process, while switching from business to personal and vice versa - horrible!

So - all in all I'm looking forward to seeing this go live and I hope some of my wishlist can be checked off.

Take a look at the video above and let me know what you think.