Do banks do user research? The kind of research that would tell them that while offering a weekly account balance update via SMS is A Good Idea and A Good Product, that sending it at 4am (aka the middle of the night) every week is a A Bad Idea and actually results in A Bad Brand Experience? The kind of research which would look at a customer's relationship with their mobile phone, and that surely a significant proportion of mobile phone users sleep with said phone within earshot?
In my bank's case, presumably not. And so, every week, my sleep is broken at 4am with a sobering reminder of my financial ineptitude - which provides a tasty double whammy of both waking me up and pissing me off.
The bank in question here is First Direct, which I chose because of their decent track record in online and telephone banking and reliable backers, but mainly of course for the typography.
However, their sharply rendered website means jack when their designers aren't working with this wider user experience, and their notion of brand behaviour and brand experience is considered only in terms of nice ads and minimal layouts. And someone hasn't been doing their research.
