captured sparks

The first thing is the security question. I can’t remember ever telling Aviva the name of the first street I lived on but will assume for these purposes that I did. The street name consisted of 7 letters and then 5 letters: let’s say Putting Green.

The first problem is of course encountered when entering the 13th letter. To make it work, the space needs to be included. This then presents the second problem; the 8th letter would be the space. It is easy enough to remove the space when creating the security question but no security question should allow the user to enter a string with spaces when you’re asking for specific letters.

The second issue is that the statement, “Not sure of your answer>>”, which one assumes to be a link, is not a link.

I was viewing this in Safari 4, so I’m not sure what they are doing with the password hint box. Perhaps it works fine in IE.

Finally, and it is not demonstrated on the screenshot, the cursor retains its default setting when hovering over the continue and back links. It should of course change to pointer so that user expectations are met when hovering a link.

As a result of this, my account ended up being locked. Despite an online request for somebody to contact me to fix it, I’ve had no response. I gave up waiting in their phone queue after 15 minutes.

One would hope that large companies could avoid such basic errors, particularly when the service is marketed as an online service. Access to all policy documents is via the online portal so it is a fundamental part of their service.