Bank of America : Restricting formats

Exclusive use of Word-formatted guides is unnecessarily restrictive.

The Site

Bank of America, a leading US personal and business banking services group, has a Suppliers sub-section in its company information that includes guidance for potential suppliers on how to register with its supply chain management division.

A Quick Reference Guide gives a bullet-point summary of the information suppliers will need to have at hand in order to complete the online registration. This appears as a web page in a secondary browser window. Much more detail, including frequently asked questions, is included in a lengthy Supplier Registration User Guide (Detail). This is a Word document and opens in a secondary window or as a download. It is not available in other formats such as PDF or HTML (web pages).

The Takeaway

Bank of America’s supplier guides are notably helpful both for new registrants and existing suppliers using the online supplier website. The Quick Reference Guide is particularly useful as a time-saving primer for completing the registration form. However, the presentation of the detailed user guide as a Word document only is at odds with this and seems unnecessarily restrictive.

As presented, the user guide is a static document that requires scrolling between the index and content pages to find information, whereas this is precisely the type of information to which the dynamic properties of web pages are uniquely suited. If Bank of America has opted for a ‘raw’ Word format on the grounds that users can download it as a reference, then a PDF conversion would be a better option. Not only can PDF documents now be produced with full indexing and internal navigation, but the format is more inherently stable than Word across a range of operating systems and browsers (in Word, for example, Bank of America’s user guide downloads as a 46-page document on a PC/Internet Explorer set-up but at 139 pages on Mac/Safari).

First published on 30 May, 2006