Can you please fix the online account usability?... ASAP

andyroid

When I first signed up for my Electric Ireland online account (in July 2014) I was appalled by the online account experience. It simply seemed broken. It was so bad that I thought it was probably a temporary issue, however I decided to send an email to customer support anyway highlighting the issues I saw:

"I just signed up for online billing and was very surprised to see the current user interface is extremely crude and hard to navigate. I think your team has done a good job with the rest of the Electric Ireland site, so it's a shame this lets it down so much."

Along with that I included a bunch of screenshots that clearly demonstrated the problems... additionally I cc'd the ESB Access Officer whose role is "to help ESB customers and employees with disabilities to access ESB services and information more easily" – at least, I thought, this would be of concern to them.

Zero response.

Two months later, when my next bill was issued (Sept 2014), I logged again and saw that nothing had changed. Disappointed, I sent a follow up:

"Just logged in to update my meter readings, and I can see that nothing has been done about this yet. So far that's almost 2 months to fix a relatively straightforward web design issue that adversely affects all customers. Very poor show."

I got a reply this time thanking me for my feedback and that the relevant department had been notified.

However to this day (Feb 2015) nothing at all has changed. 

I am always saddened when technology makes things more complicated than they need to be; it should of course do the opposite. There are so many out there who are still learning how the internet can make their lives simpler (some of whom may be elderly or with slightly impaired vision, etc.), yet this kind of experience is off-putting, frustrating and confusing.

As the leading supplier of electricity in Ireland... you can do better, in fact you have a responsibility to do so!

In case there is any ambiguity (or just in case I am the only one with these issues) the video below demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aCCuqy3sPU

andyroid

Oh and one other thing... the logo image used in your customer support email replies is ridiculously tall and stretched (at least in Gmail), and makes it hard to follow threads. Try it yourselves. This has also been an issue for at least as long as the issues described above.

I don't understand why you've let these things go on so long, it's very unprofessional. Any web designer/developer could fix all of these issues in one day... so I suspect the issue is not with your team's technical ability.

EI: Una

Hi andyroid,

We are sorry to read of your unhappiness with your customer experience, thanks for providing the above detailed feedback.

In general we cannot guarantee a time-frame as to when any changes come into effect, but we have escalated to the relevant department that you have posted the above, as well as providing them with all the details of it.

Regards,
Una

mckildare

andyroid,

What browser are you using? Using Firefox and IE I have a very different and much neater layout...the amount is very clearly separated as is all the activity listed underneath in different colours and boxed tables. The text is also the same font size as boards.ie and all other websites.
The heading links are a bit outdated in terms of style and could be bigger but maybe your browser displays them even smaller.
I guess that any updates a customer comes up with are (hopefully) added into a much larger website upgrade. This may not happen for a long time though and when multiple browsers are involved, it usually drags on even longer.

M

andyroid

mckildare wrote: »

What browser are you using? Using Firefox and IE I have a very different and much neater layout...

Thanks for contributing to this thread mckildare.

The video I made shows how it looks in Chrome on a Mac, but it looks exactly the same in Firefox and Safari (on a Mac). All latest versions.

In response to your post, I decided to seek out a Windows computer to test it out. I tried the latest version of IE, Firefox and Chrome and can confirm that yes, it becomes usable. There are background colours, larger fonts, and the tabular formatting is certainly far better. Still not fantastic by modern web design standards, but at least usable.

So it seems something is blocking part of the site's stylesheet from loading on Macs, which is a shame... and very odd... but probably even easier to fix that I originally thought. I was certainly not expecting it to render differently in Chrome/Firefox on Windows vs Mac.

Anyway, here's hoping for a cross-browser fully responsive overhauled design... or in the meantime a quick fix for Mac browsers.

Electric Ireland: David

Hi andyroid/mckildare,

Thanks for the additional posts. I've forwarded the above to our web development team for follow-up.

Once again thanks for your feedback. If there's anything else we can help with don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,
David

EI: Una

Hi again andyroid,

The relevant department have confirmed that work is being done on rebuilding the Electric Ireland residential digital platform to address these known issues and more.
The aim is for the updates to go live later this year.

Thanks again for all the details.

Regards,
Una

andyroid

Electric Ireland: Una wrote: »

The relevant department have confirmed that work is being done on rebuilding the Electric Ireland residential digital platform to address these known issues and more.
The aim is for the updates to go live later this year.

Thanks again for all the details.

No problem. I'm happy to hear that this work is underway and look forward to seeing how it turns out. Thanks for relaying the messages.

EI: Aoife

Hi andyroid,

You're very welcome.

If you've any other queries, do let us know.

Regards,
Aoife

andyroid

Electric Ireland: Aoife wrote: »

Hi andyroid,

You're very welcome.

If you've any other queries, do let us know.

Regards,
Aoife

Update: Just logged in to my account and was very happy to see a beautiful new UI that worked perfectly. Thank you.

Electric Ireland: Una

Hi andyroid,

Thanks for the post. Yes, we are delighted to be introducing the new Electric Ireland online billing interface!

https://youraccountonline.electricireland.ie/

Kind regards,
Una

mckildare

I find the new layout worse to be honest, I have to scroll down a bit to find the most useful information, previous payments. The previous payments table is too spaced out - 37 pages of payments...

Was there not an option to view previous payments over 6/12/18 months in the last version? I found that useful to compare year-on-year bills...

Maybe the web design team have large monitors over in EI but on a normal laptop, I don't think it looks great!

Electric Ireland: David

Hi mckildare,

We're sorry to hear you don't like the new layout.

mckildare wrote:

The previous payments table is too spaced out - 37 pages of payments... Maybe the web design team have large monitors over in EI but on a normal laptop, I don't think it looks great!

The new layout was designed responsively to scale to the screen size of whatever device the customer uses, but we do appreciate your feedback and I understand your point about the table. If it helps, the usage history section does give an 18-month overview of energy consumption, so you can see at a glance your own usage patterns.

Thanks,
David