The One Account: Warning of lost information

A customer-friendly warning about a characteristic of online application forms that is a common source of irritation.

The Site

The One Account is a personal financial services joint venture between Virgin Direct and The Royal Bank of Scotland.

As well as giving existing customers access to manage their accounts, the website allows potential new clients to make an application online. Once the form-filling starts, if at any stage they hit the page’s ‘back’ button a pop-up warns that to proceed will cause them to lose the information they have already entered on the current page.

The Takeaway

The One Account has come up with a customer-friendly warning about a characteristic of online application forms that is a common source of irritation – losing information if you go back to review an earlier page.

Much of the irritation comes from the automatic default in the process – you click and it is gone. By taking a user-centric view of the process The One Account makes no assumptions about how familiar or tolerant users will be with the data-loss characteristic. But at the same time it subtly shifts the responsibility to the user – ‘if you really want to do this you know what will happen’.

Anything that reduces surprise in a form-filling or ordering process must reduce irritation and therefore increase completion rates. It is surprising that One Account’s precautionary approach is so rarely followed.

First published on 12 February, 2004