LANDINGS COMPLAINT

Dear David Rindone:

I am a happy client of Landings Credit Union and I have enjoyed working with your excellent staff, so please excuse the truculence of these comments.

I am just constantly disappointed with the substandard bill pay site that Landings has. The bill pay site is very poorly designed and should be fixed so it meets reasonable standards. Its general features work, but just barely. And many other things don't work at all. They appear to have been abandoned in the middle of production and never finished.

It isn't up to me to go through the site and catalog all the things that are wrong with it. Instead, here's here's my problem just for the day. Just today, mind you.

Pretend you're me and want to see how much you've been paying a payee in the past. (I had an unusually high gas bill today and needed to check what I usually pay.)

Click on the Payee and you'll NOT automatically see your latest payment along with previous payments as you would certainly expect. No way. That would be on a well designed site. You see only the latest payment.* So you click HISTORY and then, to your annoyance, you'll see a menagerie of DIFFERENT payees with with their latest payment dates. That isn't history. That isn't even the payee you're interested in. This feature doesn't appear to have been finished.

You say to yourself, "Why am I seeing OTHER payees?" So you click on the PAYEE button and choose the payee you were looking at to begin with. You'll be right back where you started. That is, you'll see once again the latest bill payment because the default is set to TODAY.

Today isn't history.

The history button doesn't function AT ALL. It isn't broken; that would imply that it ever worked at all. It was never finished. There's a word for this: indolence.

I repeat: clicking the history button within a payee's information doesn't show you the history of the payee. It shows you its latest payment along with the latest payments of everyone else. Some history button. Is this the pride the Landings IT staff takes in their craft?

If you set the range yourself as the programmers should have done for you, if you jump through that hoop, it is possible to see the history. But what a hassle. This is what is known as a WORKAROUND. Workarounds are what the user must go to the trouble of learning to do in order to get around the mistakes of careless, indifferent programmers.

As I said, it isn't my job to go through all the things that are wrong with this sloppily and lazily designed site.

ITEM: I am now trying to find out where to send this note. In bill pay, I tried clicking CONTACT and you know what I get? A screen saying that I have no messages and no way to send one. That's what a button labeled CONTACT does? Well it does nothing at all and is a dead end and a blank page. As is true so often, this makes no sense. At the best, it's mislabeled.

It would be a service both to the company and to its customers if the site were finished properly and its many errors fixed.

Truculently yours,

Tom Cole

*You won't see even THIS when you go to the bill pay main view. The latest payment isn't shown with "Pending" next to it. It just isn't there at all, so you can't track your progress while you're paying your bills. It only appears after the bill is posted in a few days. Until then, it will continue to say "Last paid on (last month's payment date, not today's). But I digress; I said I wasn't going to cite everything wrong.