Recently my health insurance changed from a high deductible plan to a more reasonable PPO. Anyway I still have an HSA from my previous plan. I thought it might be a good idea to transfer my HSA money into my IRA… wow more acronyms than the w3c. After finding the website of my HSA provider, I decide to sign up for an account. This is what I got:

First off, the logo and the layout are simply stunning. Secondly, if you haven’t already, take a closer look at the requirements for both the user id and the password. Why the H are they requiring such a random user id? It’s requirements are way higher than that of the passords. Why only 4 characters of headway? How are you supposed to create anything even remotely meaningful? After 3 - 5 minutes of deep thought I was able to come up with something amusing, but I’m a power user, I doubt there demographic is even capable of figuring out how to make a user id… If they really need this crap to be that random, why not just hand out a random id?

As if this weren’t enough, I was prompted to use there advanced forgotten password system before I could continue. Take a look:

Boy, they were right on the money with this one. For starters, they opened up a new window for me, thanks Leesport, can’t get enough windows. And the questions… “my favorite president?”, who has a favorite president? You’ve gotta love the assumption that all of Leesport’s customers have pets and love sports, why wouldn’t they?

Finally after getting into this valuable service that Leesport is offering it’s customers, I found it to be utterly worthless. There was a transfers tab, but of course this did nothing. How can such a high profile site blow so hardcore? The friggin thing looks like a highschool project.

I can honestly say that Leesport’s service is by far the worst experience I have had with online banking. HSBC comes in at a close second. Fortunately, I found someone that cares about design and functionality in Bank of America.