//nedward.org

Since we’re in the process of moving, I’ve spent a lot of time switch­ing util­i­ties to the new apartment.

For a few months now, I’ve been paying our Ver­i­zon phone & DSL bill online, because it’s easy and I don’t need to dig up my check­book. How­ever, Verizon’s online bill man­age­ment leaves much to be desired…

When you log in, the account sum­mary dis­plays the amount you owe, listed under “Payment due” (see screen-​shot at left). So, I would peri­od­i­cally log in, note the dollar amount, and after a few clicks, a credit-​card pay­ment was submitted.

There is a prob­lem with this system how­ever — the bill sum­mary info is taken directly from your last printed bill, and is in no way reflec­tive of any pay­ments made since the billing date. This resulted in us over­pay­ing month after month.

Gen­er­ally, it seems to me that a brief account sum­mary should show your up-to-the-minute bal­ance, and click­ing “View Bill” should show your last printed bill (which may not show recent pay­ments). This logic, how­ever, seems to have escaped Verizon’s web team.

Instead of the cur­rent bal­ance greet­ing you after log­ging in, you’re forced to click on “View Bill”, and scroll down the page to a curi­ously phrased line that reads: Total Cur­rent Live Bal­ance as of 9/11/2003 is : $0 (see screen-​shot at left).

Total Cur­rent Live Bal­ance. Does that sound like an after­thought, or what? Why on earth would this bit of infor­ma­tion be found in the middle of a past bill, and not on the billing summary?

I can only sur­mise that a lot of users like me started com­plain­ing about the con­fu­sion, so they had one of their back-​end devel­op­ers insert a bit of code, with­out both­er­ing to hire a UI person and ask them if what they were doing was intuitive.

Though it may seem like a small issue, I think it is embar­rass­ingly bad — because it could create a neg­a­tive per­cep­tion that online Ver­i­zon pay­ments are a hassle. And, it’s not going to con­vince users to switch to “Paper-Free Billing”.

Attn: Ver­i­zon, I am avail­able for UI consulting.