Designing for Experience

So I used to bank at Regions Bank. There aren’t a lot of good choices for banking in Bloomington, IN if you ask me. We’ve tried most of the major banks in town, and some of the local alternatives. Most of the online banking sites are really bad, and regions closed the branch that was close to us. I think we’re going to go back to Chase, at least the online banking doesn’t suck with Chase, unlike the others we have tried.

We recently got this from Regions: (I apologize in advance for making you click the image, but he full-size image broke the column layout)

This is supposed to bring us “new benefits” and “greater convenience”

So they are coming into the 2004 by letting us choose from a list of merchants. Wow! We can access our credit card information…. ummmm again this has been around for ages. Really lame stuff. The new alert thing is decent, but Chase has been doing that for at least a couple of years, I applaud them for adding it though. Then they start taking things away. One used to be able to access register items from way back. NO LONGER. Why wouldn’t ppl want this information?

My favorite is the following

They basically took several really useful features from online banking and said screw you! You’ll need to call us or come into a bank, or just log in more often. Why would you encourage people to come into branches or call 1-800 numbers to do simple things like transfer from one account to another or stop payment? This doesn’t make a lot of business or design design sense.

Oh the follies of letting the system dictate the functions instead of well-thought out, human-centered, sound business design.

Sad…

Shame on you regions!

As Dave Royer & Kevin let me know today links to individual posts and commenting was broken.  I have no idea why, and just as randomly, when I went to go and login and fix any problems (or at least attempt to do so) it was all working again.  I’m baffled frankly.

In any case  let’ s hope it stays that way.

So I have to admit that I haven’t been posting nearly as often as I would like.  Add to that the fact that I have tons of friends out there blogging these days and I’m really enjoying reading their posts.  While I had initially thought that I would keep this blog focused mostly on things technological and professional, I decided I must add in some family and friends posts.  It will be for the best I think.  If the day comes that I need to make two separate blogs, so be it, but for now here we are.

That being said please click some of my links to the right and see who else I know who’s blogging!

OK So I’ll be the first one to say, “huh?” on this one, but that was because I didn’t quite understand what it was about at first.

Go to seriousgames.ning.com and you’ll get a better picture of what I’m talking about. Ning.com seems to be a social networking site and you can have friends on there just like on facebook or other social networks, but in this case you can build communities of people who are all interested in the same topic. The theory is that people can get together and talk about serious games, form relationships, and develop ideas in that space.

Will it work? I have no idea, but I am willing to find out.

Visit my profile add me as a friend, let’s talk!

So yes as you may imagine from the subtitle of my blog I’m interested in serious games. Serious Games? I mean, this term means almost nothing to someone outside of the industry, and I just love the looks I get when I drop that term on people. Confusion, a wry grin, and who can blame them, it’s an odd term. Especially when I’m going to stand (well I’m actually sitting) here and tell you I think that first and foremost serious games should be GAMES, i.e. really fun to play.

So yes I’m interested in Serious Games as well as non-serious games, entertainment computing, or whatever you want to call it. I am interested in the topic generally, but more specifically I think that UI in most games needs serious help. I want to make it easy for new players to pick up a game and play. I want to make it welcoming to the newbie, while still satisfying the power user (is such a thing even possible?). Do I want to make it the focus of my professional life? That’s a definite maybe for now.