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Establishing secure connection

wellsoffice.wellsfargo.com

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Re: Establishing secure connection

#21

Post by Mahn »

MattRogish wrote: post #16

This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…

If I had to throw a guess, I'd say there was a random non technical manager in the company who saw the page was loading too fast and didn't like it; "it should show there is a heavy process in the background, otherwise our customers will think it is too simple!". Either way I doubt an UX genius is behind this.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#25

Post by nym »

jmandzik wrote: post #11

Somewhere, deep within Wells Fargo HQ, there was a depressed developer in a windowless office that died a little inside when asked to make this.

I worked with the dev who wrote this at Wells Fargo.

To be fair, they do have windows in their office.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#26

Post by courtewing »

Mahn wrote: post #21
MattRogish wrote: post #16

This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…

If I had to throw a guess, I'd say there was a random non technical manager in the company who saw the page was loading too fast and didn't like it; "it should show there is a heavy process in the background, otherwise our customers will think it is too simple!". Either way I doubt an UX genius is behind this.

It could be the opposite. Wells Fargo has a lot of different apps that need to authenticate and integrate with their identity management/sso system. It is near-trivial to implement this sort of thing, but it isn't necessarily trivial to make it fast.

I wouldn't be surprised if the authentication process was taking long enough that a decision was made to add some sort of "loader" like this to make it appear like the extra time was absolutely necessary from a security standpoint.

It's a bit of a lazy decision from a UX standpoint, but it isn't entirely uncommon either: when you notice some action is slow, slap an animation in front of it.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#28

Post by syassami »

Mahn wrote: post #21
MattRogish wrote: post #16

This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…

If I had to throw a guess, I'd say there was a random non technical manager in the company who saw the page was loading too fast and didn't like it; "it should show there is a heavy process in the background, otherwise our customers will think it is too simple!". Either way I doubt an UX genius is behind this.

Ah, The good old Thread.sleeep(10000) to make it feel extra secure

Re: Establishing secure connection

#29

Post by markkanof »

MattRogish wrote: post #16

This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…

I worked for a company that implemented a similar technique and it had positive results. The main features of one of their web based software products was a report generator. The report was quite complex and included a lot of calculations based hierarchical relationships of entities in the system. To build this report by hand would probably take hours, but the queries and calculations were all highly optimized and could be run by the server almost instantly.

Many users complained that they didn't like paying so much for this feature because it didn't really seem to be doing very much. Instead of trying to educate each individual customer about all the intricacies of the report they just added a dialog box that would display for ~10 seconds and step through a few fake progress messages. People stopped complaining about paying for the report, and I would assume that is because the progress messages made them feel like something complicated was happening.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#30

Post by rgbrenner »

Mahn wrote: post #21
MattRogish wrote: post #16

This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…

If I had to throw a guess, I'd say there was a random non technical manager in the company who saw the page was loading too fast and didn't like it; "it should show there is a heavy process in the background, otherwise our customers will think it is too simple!". Either way I doubt an UX genius is behind this.

If I had to guess, I would say it was the opposite. The page was loading too slowly, so users would click submit a second time. So the popup was added so the users know their first click was received and the page is loading.

Seriously, users will resubmit forms if the next page doesn't respond in a 1000ms - 1500ms.

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