Citibank is one of the biggest banks in the world. You would think they would have high standards in usability testing. Apparently not. In the last 5 minutes I have found 2 serious bugs in their web portal.

1. I have 2 messages waiting from them. I click the message drop down box and click the second message. Unfortunately it instead shows me the first message. In order to get to the second message I have to hunt around for the button to “list all messages” on a different page, and then click on the second message.
2. I tried to respond to a Citibank employee who was asking me what kind of checks I wanted. I wrote my response, but when I hit “send” it said “Can’t send the message. Don’t use any special characters, such as ampersand, slash, hyphen, etc.”. Well, I wasn’t using any of the characters they explicitly mentioned, so I must have been using one that falls under “etc.” So, I take out the dollar sign. Still doesn’t work. I take out the colon. Still doesn’t work. I take out the parentheses. This time it doesn’t complain, but instead tells me that there was an error and my message wasn’t sent.

Lessons for Citibank to learn:

1. Test with more than 1 message before deploying to your tens of millions of users.
2. Sanitizing your database input makes more sense than putting silly restrictions on what characters your tens of millions of users can put in a message.
3. If you insist on having silly character restrictions on messages, at least tell your users clearly what those restrictions are.