If you weren’t in church this morning, you were probably sleeping in, watching TV or just generally taking it easy. Whichever it was, you likely weren’t doing any online financial transactions, and the people at GTBank figured it would probably be the best time to sneak in a major site upgrade. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, the bank trashed the old website and put up a shiny new one. Hopefully, you didn’t notice anything while it was going on. I didn’t until this evening.
When I did discover it, It took me all of thirty seconds to notice a number of interesting things about this “upgrade”. In fact, before writing this post, I’ve only spent a total of about 15 minutes on the new site, so this is NOT a definitive review. In fact it’s not a review at all. Just a few things I’d like to point out.
Here we go. First, the good stuff.
It looks like they finally dropped the Flash for more current web technologies. I also think I noticed significant performance gains in site speed and loading time. Well done.
They’ve gone for a fullscreen layout for the homescreen, a bold move towards what they obviously hope is a modern design preference. While it’s not the kind of user interface you’d expect to encounter on a banking website, I can’t say I don’t like it. In other parts, the site reverts to a simple boxed layout.
Most of the important navigation elements now live in a tabbed jquery flyout menu to the right of the screen. I think it not only makes for a far less cluttered design than the former site, it’s also far more intuitive.
The internet banking tab is now one of the most prominent features to be seen, which I consider to be the biggest user experience improvement they’ve achieved here. Internet banking is the biggest reason why people visit the site in the first place, making it the 13th most visited site in Nigeria (Alexa stats as at the time of this post). The internet banking links on the previous site were so obscure that I still consider myself in debt to Namzo for creating a Google chrome app that takes me directly to the internet banking login screen. Compared to the old hair-tearing experience on the previous site, the internet banking function is now dead easy to find — but I doubt I’ll be using it, seeing as Namzo’s app also saves me the trouble of loading the GTBank site every single time.
Now, for the not so good stuff.
Everything sucks on mobile. Okay, maybe not everything, and not for everyone. All I’ve tested it on is Opera Mini, but as far as mobile goes, that’s enough barometer for me, and it’s practically unusable there. I got a second opinion from Kehers who said it was “fair” on the Android native browser. I could use a third opinion too, please say how it is in the comments. But if you use Opera Mini, like I imagine most of us in these parts do, you’ll agree that it’s horrible compared to the former mobile version. I hope they fix it soon.
Some of the aesthetics are disappointing, to say the least. Certainly not what you’d expect from GTBank. I’m not crazy about the flyout animation from the navigation tabs for instance. But where I just gave up is when I saw the community and miscellaneous icons at the bottom of the screen. Trust me, you’d have to work really hard to get more web 1.0 than those icons. And they are rampant on various parts of the site.
There are also a few loose bolts here and there that could have been screwed on tighter. For instance, the transparent banner at the bottom overlaps the the “reactivate your account” link, making it really hard to reach. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they wanted to punish people for letting their accounts go dormant in the first place.
15 minutes later and what do I think? Well, I can say that the new GTBank website is an improvement on the old one, in some respects. In others, not.
GTbank has been known to exhibit fanatic levels of taste with regard to the design and architecture of its physical branches, so I’ve come to expect just a little more class and attention to detail. At the very least, the bugs I identified need to be fixed pronto.
So I said my bit. Over to you. Do you like the new GTBank website?
