Wasting My Time

This is another major pet peeve of mine. I am a busy person, I have no time to waste wading through badly laid out pages, slow downloads, and features that cost me way more time and effort than they should!

I suppose this subject is fresh on my mind, because our bank recently changed from one online banking website service to another. I used to be able to check my bank balance reliably, albeit awkwardly. Now the whole process is so much more of a hassle I'd not have believed it could have got so much worse!

The old system had a link on the home page for Accounts. That lead to a page where it told you that your account access was on another site. You had to click to go ahead. That lead to a page where you had to AGAIN click Accounts. That lead to the login page. A simple login page on the home page would have done the job!

Once I got to the accounts though, I could click on the one I wanted to view, and it popped right up, after about 30 seconds. I bookmarked the login page, and cut out most of the hassle.

After they changed it, the first part of the process was the same, only every page took four times as long to load, and many of them timed out first. The login page loaded flawlessly, and then it was downhill from there!

I had to try 4 times to login, because it kept timing out on me. Finally the next page loaded, and it was a message page, with a Continue button. I was pretty exasperated by then! I clicked continue, and it timed out. It did that three times. Finally the accounts page came up, giving me the option to see details on specific accounts by clicking another link. I did so. It timed out. I did so again. It timed out again. Two more tries later, it finally went forward.... And kicked me BACK to the login page because the session had timed out! I went through the whole process again, including repeats on the downloads, until it finally let me view my account balances.

I have used this system since, and it is not much better. It is frustrating every time I use it, and even though I have a slow internet connection, this site will misbehave when no other intensive sites do.

I just hate it when someone wastes my time. Most people I know are very busy. Even when they have time to just play, they don't want someone to frustrate them - that is their time to relax!

Pages that don't work right, or that take several tries to get to work, pages that download painfully slowly (and usually without justification), or links that lead to useless pages (or that include useless or redundant pages in between), are colossal time wasters. People do not appreciate that!

Pet peeve or not, this is a very valid complaint, and something that can leave your site visitors not just clicking backward, but holding a grudge! The more necessary your service is to them, the more they will resent you.

Written by Laura Wheeler