A friend of mine just sent me this screenshot of SBMNet, State Bank of Mauritius (SBM)’s online banking facility. She wanted to transfer some money from her account to a friend’s at another bank. She was then presented with the form below:

SBM, that’s not how you design forms. Seriously, we don’t all have a degree in banking to know what your “Payee Id” is, what’s the difference between a Payee name and a Beneficiary Name and why you need four fields of Payment Details, intuitively called “Payment Details 1” to “Payment Details 4”. The sparse help messages are not helpful. At all.

Anyway, what’s Beneficiary Bank Address 2 and 3?! Come’on! It’s ridiculous! Fix your thing, before you can even claim to offer “online banking” on your adverts. It’s not useful.

Oh btw? The said friend? She’s decided to go in person to a bank branch to do the transfer. So much for your online services.

How it should be done? How about:

• Meaningful form names? Payment Details 1 is not helpful.
• Contextual help when you hover on the forms?
• Auto complete? Data-specific fields? Why should the user enter date? Can’t they choose from a dropdown?
• Information overload! Use a couple of screens, with steps and a “next” button?
• Or you know, just something like this

Hopefully someone will see this and fix this, or at least suggest a better design proposal. :p

EDIT: It’s 2016! They finally changed it!