A story about UI / UX being too bad on an online government bond purchase site and temporarily losing more than 2 million yen



In online services, not only the system itself, but also the

user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) that lead to user comfort are important. A blog post reporting that the UI and UX were the worst when trying to buy the US price-linked government bond 'I-bond' online on the government site has become a hot topic on the social news site Hacker News.

https://beanlog.vercel.app/ibonds
https://beanlog.vercel.app/ibonds

I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31222506

I-bond is a government bond whose principal amount increases or decreases according to price trends. In other words, if prices rise after the issuance of an I-bond, the original amount of the I-bond will also increase. According to the blog author, if you buy before May 2022, you can expect a return of up to 8.5% in the next 12 months. Since I-bond can be purchased up to $ 10,000 (about 1.3 million yen) a year, you can get up to $ 850 (about 110,000 yen) in one year.

Therefore, the blog author said that he purchased government bonds by accessing treasurydirect.gov , a government bond purchase site of the US government. However, the blog author says, 'I've seen a lot of bad UX so far, but treasurydirect.gov may be terrible at the top.'

First, in treaturydirect.gov, you can enter the password with the virtual keyboard. However, the blog author claims that 'this method cannot prevent the automatic input of BOT, it simply slows down the input speed of human users.' However, Hacker News points out that ' the purpose of the virtual keyboard is to block keyloggers, not just to block automatic input by BOTs .'



Furthermore, the actual purchase screen is below. You can select government bonds with radio buttons here, but it is difficult to tell whether you are selecting and purchasing the correct government bonds because the essential interest rate is not written anywhere.



The blog author, who was afraid to suddenly buy a $ 10,000 I-bond with this UI, first bought only $ 25 (about 3300 yen). It took several days to process the transaction, but looking at the screen below, it seems that the purchase process went smoothly.



So the blog author decided to buy the remaining $ 9975. However, when I moved to the screen to enter the amount, 'If I enter the amount of' $ 10,000 'on this screen, can I buy only $ 9975 and get back $ 25? Or will I get an error and buy? Will it fail? '

So, the blog author was curious and entered the amount of '10,000 dollars' and processed the purchase, and the purchase request was completed successfully. After that, it seems that a notification email of processing failure arrived as expected by the blog author, and the text is as follows.



The email said, 'Your purchase exceeds the annual purchase limit for government bonds. Refunds for excess purchases will be transferred to the bank in 8-10 weeks.' It's unclear in this text whether the purchase is invalid and $ 10,000 is returned, or whether the $ 9975 purchase is successful and only the excess is returned, but the blog author is probably the former. I interpret it as.

The blog author said, 'treasurydirect.gov has already received my money, and does it take 8-10 weeks to return it? Is there a backend server, or just a mouse handling banknotes? Is that so? '

After that, the blog author remembered that he still had $ 10,000 left in his savings account and bought another $ 9,975. However, I heard that I received an email again saying, 'Your purchase amount exceeds the annual purchase limit of government bonds. Refunds will be transferred to the bank in 8 to 10 weeks.' 2000 yen) and only $ 25 worth of I-bonds remained.

Hacker News said, 'The US government is like a computer, and it seems like you can't talk to it or solve a problem. It's like if something goes wrong, it's over. ' ' I work with government software .' At that time, I learned from the information given that I had to assume the worst case, 'said a comment lamenting the poor response of the US government.

Also, ' Isn't it natural that you intentionally tried to make a transaction that violated the rules and it didn't work? ' ' If you are urged to check the specifications with the bank's app, stop this story as a lesson. I think so. '

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in Web Service, Posted by log1i_yk