CapitalOne User Experience

CapitalOne could have emailed me with the following short note:

Due to forthcoming changes in our online banking, please visit the following URL if you access Bill Pay via Quicken: capitalonebank.com/betteronlinebanking . If you don't do Bill Pay via Quicken, you can safely ignore this email.

I don't do Bill Pay at CapitalOne via Quicken, and so I could have immediately got on with my day. Instead, CapitalOne chose a process which unnecessarily cost me about five to seven minutes of my time.

1. They emailed me to let me know that a new "secure message" was waiting for me in my account.

2. I then had to login, figure out where the "message" area is, navigate there, and then click on the new message.

3. The new message told me that changes were coming, and to learn more, I needed to visit that above URL.

4. I visited the above URL, and determined that this update doesn't affect me.

Considering every aspect of the user experience is important. Due to this experience with CapitalOne, instead of thinking "What a smart bank!", I'm left thinking, "I wonder how much of my CapitalOne fees goes to supporting inefficient operations?"