A poorly designed Web site.

You think that with the money they obviously have to spend, the folks at Mellon Investor Services would have used some real talent to build their Web site. They obviously didn’t.

Sure, it looks pretty, but it’s nearly impossible to navigate without clicking a bunch of wrong navigation buttons. And half the buttons you press spawn a new little window that displays a stop-light graphic and the message that the information is being accessed. The thing that bugged me the most was when I was required to change my pin to a 6-15 character number. It took me four tries to enter a number the system liked, and when I did, the dialog that appeared gave me the impression that I’d screwed up so bad that they were offering to do it for me. I later discovered that the PIN Manager wasn’t a person but a feature of the site that had been unlabeled as such.

Jakob Nielsen of Web usability fame would have a field day with the Mellon site.

I called for help when a feature I was trying to use kept displaying an error message. After various discussion and hold sessions with two different people on two different calls, I was asked to confirm that I was using Internet Explorer. I told her that I wasn’t, that I was using Firefox on a Mac and wouldn’t waste space on my hard disk with a Web browser that hadn’t been updated for four years. She obviously didn’t understand my sarcasm because she told me to “exit” Firefox and “start” Explorer. I repeated that I was on a Mac and if their site didn’t work on a Mac they were alienating a lot of users.

After another hold, I was told that her supervisor could duplicate the error message and that there was probably something wrong with the site.

Duh.

She then suggested that I try another time. By this time (30 minutes after my initial attempt to use the system), I was fed up and ready to hang up. But she had to get one last dig in: “Have I helped you with all your concerns today?”

“No,” I said. And I hung up.