Live data from Hacker News

Establishing secure connection

wellsoffice.wellsfargo.com

151–160 of 161 posts

Re: Establishing secure connection

#151
post #10

This sort of fake-loader animated GIF is pretty common; it's just a slightly more advanced version of a spinner GIF. I don't think it's really that bad. What would be bad is if this page would accept a parameter to redirect you to somewhere, but it appears it doesn't do that -- it just closes itself. Presumably this page appears in an overlay that then closes itself.

With spinner gifs, you generally tell them to stop spinning after some event; this just closes the window after a hard-coded 10 seconds.

With most of the spinner gifs I use, the gif will just be in the element that I put the dynamic content into. Then when I load the content into the element, the gif is replaced and disappears.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#152
post #10

This sort of fake-loader animated GIF is pretty common; it's just a slightly more advanced version of a spinner GIF. I don't think it's really that bad. What would be bad is if this page would accept a parameter to redirect you to somewhere, but it appears it doesn't do that -- it just closes itself. Presumably this page appears in an overlay that then closes itself.

It's not "bad" in the sense of actually hurting people, but it is dishonest... it's a meaningless progress bar (not so terrible, Windows has us used to these), but the series of lies flitting on and off the page definitely isn't good . We all know banks aren't trustworthy, but that's what they should be, and their goal should be actual trustworthiness and not false, theatrical crap like this.

How is it dishonest? I would consider it a theatrical demonstration of what's actually happening.

The steps of the gif are: -Establishing secure connection -Sending Credentials -Authenticating -Building Secure Environment

That's not too far off of layman's terms of what is happening when they logon albeit just not as slow.

If it provides a layperson the same sense of trust that a technical person would feel if they listed the technical terms, isn't this an accurate demonstration?

Re: Establishing secure connection

#153
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father was an audio engineer/mixer and worked with some big names. He told me a similar story that happened to him later in life when he finally owned his own studio. There were clients that would always insist on making audio adjustments, for no good reason at all. They were paying to have their music professionally mixed, yet still insisted on making adjustments and changes. Finally my dad and his friend came up…

One of the best designers I've ever worked with had a similar great strategy with clients who considered themselves design experts (usually senior marketing/advertising managers) and who would almost inevitably want to change something in the “final” design. The solution he had was to leave one obvious minor flaw in the final design – a color which doesn't quite match, odd font choice, etc. It was a lighting rod for…

This reminds me of a scene from the movie "This Film Is Not Yet Rated", where Stone and Parker describe inserting a super-graphic sex scene into the movie "Team America", which they knew the MPAA board would ask them to remove, attracting their attention and allowing them to keep their R rating.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#155

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…

Zurb did a tech talk a while back. They found that the drop off rate for one of their long running processes dropped significantly when they added a red bouncy ball as an interstitial for any process that took more than 400 ms.

I wonder about why this is the case.

* Is it because we as users have been conditioned, through years of faulty software, to assume crap crashes/hangs when there are unexpected delays?

* Or is the majority of computing so fast and instantaneous that we can't bring ourselves to wait on something that doesn't have an immediate end in sight?

Re: Establishing secure connection

#156
post #62

This reminds me of something we had at my office about 15 years ago because people were complaining their workstations were slow. In reality, their workstations were just slow machines; standard issue box for most people was a 70MHz Sun SS-5. So we wrote a perl script that printed out a bunch of platitudes like these, while printing out an ASCII "progress bar." It had some randomly determined sleep() calls in there t…

My father was an audio engineer/mixer and worked with some big names. He told me a similar story that happened to him later in life when he finally owned his own studio. There were clients that would always insist on making audio adjustments, for no good reason at all. They were paying to have their music professionally mixed, yet still insisted on making adjustments and changes. Finally my dad and his friend came up…

I believe the "Close Doors" button on lifts/elevators is based on this principle.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father was an audio engineer/mixer and worked with some big names. He told me a similar story that happened to him later in life when he finally owned his own studio. There were clients that would always insist on making audio adjustments, for no good reason at all. They were paying to have their music professionally mixed, yet still insisted on making adjustments and changes. Finally my dad and his friend came up…

One other pretty common (and slightly less imaginary) trick is to nudge the master fader up about 1dB and play the same mix again for the client. For some psychoacoustic reason I don't fully grok, we perceive things as sounding better when they're louder, even if the difference is too small to register consciously.

Signal to noise ratio. If your noise is at some average amplitude X, and you have signal at two levels, Y and Z (and both average above X, because otherwise you would just perceive X distorted a bit), then the lower of Y and Z will have more of its amplitude within the average X amplitude. I.e., if Y < Z, Y/X < Z/X, then (loosely), Z will have a larger percentage of its signal that is not masked by noise.

Re: Establishing secure connection

#159
It happens in chemistry too. In his book The Green Flame, Dequasie told the following story:

"The salesman had been selling hydrochloric acid, sometimes known as muriatic acid. The industrial grade usually had a green tint caused by contamination with iron. The company that the salesman worked for improved its equipment at considerable expense and proudly began putting out water-white muriatic acid. The salesman immediately began getting complaints from customers who did not want that weak white stuff. They insisted that they wanted that strong green stuff that they used to get. So, for those customers, the salesman arranged to have a small nail dissolved in each jug shipped to them. Result: happiness."

Re: Establishing secure connection

#160
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more complicated than that. The last line has to match two out of three (for example, city and ZIP), and then it can try to do some reverse analysis on what you've written for the address line. (Even that's an oversimplification; it's pretty darn impressive.) The USPS also has the additional challenge of matching what you think is your address with what is actually your address. Very, very few people know their…

The USPS also has the additional challenge of matching what you think is your address with what is actually your address. Very, very few people know their address. What parts of their addresses do people typically get wrong? Where can one go to find one's actual address?

Here's where you can go to find your actual address:

    https://tools.usps.com/go/ZipLookupAction_input
There are, occasionally, errors in the database. I'm trying to get one corrected now. If you find one, go to your local Post Office, find a supervisor, and ask him or her to notify "Address Management".
Post reply on HN