Every time I visit a website I haven't seen before, I take a mental tour of the homepage and all the offerings that I am going to be exposed to as part of my visit. During the late 90s and early 2000, I used to walk away from Flash sites wondering what they were going to do next when it came to simple human interaction through web-services. These days, I wonder when they are going to change their approach to the web and then I ask myself, what has changed in the last 20years that bring us now to a stage where our expectations of a good experience on the internet is very different from what our predecessors had.
Some people will complain that all the mobile technology is killing the internet but while that may be true for the general population, there are still traditional business models out there that don't share the same sentiments as the general population on the WWW. For example, I can't foresee banking becoming easier on cellphones until and unless someone takes a firm step towards making transactions secure and more importantly, hassle free. I used a local banking application from a bank I choose not to mention in this post and I felt a little helpless because it asked for verification at every step of the transaction process. Sure, some people might say that money needs to be protected the right way but in the process of protecting it, are we really affording the end-user the best experience he or she is ever going to have with online-banking? The answer in this case is sadly no.
I cannot begin to imagine a world where I lost the ability to not store cookies on my machine or being asked to sign in every single time I visited a website because the passwords for an account should never be stored anywhere except the server. Some of us may find this a silly argument but ask yourselves this, is your data really safe on your hard drive? Sure its encrypted but does that necessarily mean that it is safe and are you happy with your experience on a site? When I sign into a website with a password, the only time I should ever be asked for any kind of input that requires authentication post that is when there is a failure to recognize who I am and there is a high risk of my data/privacy being compromised. If I take that logic into account, then a banking site fails the minute it asks me to enter a special code found on the back of my card or to use a key generator to get the special 'randomly' generated number to complete the transaction. Yet, over the course of time, we have learned to accept this as the only way to perform safe transactions. I think most people find this to be a more safe and secure way of getting transactions completed but I find them to be a bit cumbersome in the longer run. What if you didn't have your card on your or the RSS key? Your money is still your money right? Shouldn't you be able to perform a transaction without those keys because you already know the password to your account? I don't want to have to step into a bank to get it done because that's one of the primary, if not only , reason I got internet banking in the first place.
This is just one scenario but there are probably countless others where we have relied on so many levels of security to be around that we sometimes forget that the generic processes involved in getting the transaction complete should be easier and far more intuitive from a human perspective than pure security or content delivery. I am still hunting for that perfect UX application/website. Some say it exists in the Apple ecospace and I say that's not right because its not a global application yet and a subset of the population can't claim UX dominance just because they drank the kool-aid and are swimming in that ocean of "mine is better than yours".
