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One of my claims to fame was being part of the team that built the first online banking site for a bank in my country around 1997. One of the things you could

One of my claims to fame was being part of the team that built the first online banking site for a bank in my country around 1997. One of the things you could do was pay certain types of widely used paper invoices. When I was brought on, the UI for this was just a standard HTML table with labels and input boxes. I decided to build a prototype with a paper invoice image as the background and a textboxes places where the numbers appearred on the paper invoice. When people paid the invoice, they would have the paper version they had received by postal mail next to them. Now, their mission was to enter the numbers so they would end up with a visual one-to-one copy of the paper invoice on the computer screen. It made it easy for everyone to figure out which numbers to enter. People embraced this immediately, and all forms were changed to follow this principle. All banks implemented it in their banking apps and still use it today.

onion2k 2y ago
Around the same time (2001) I worked for a startup that was doing the same thing but with Flash instead of HTML. We were building European export forms. People really liked the UI side of it.
crote 2y ago
In my country we used to have a heavily standardized type of money transfer card. It'd be used both for regular wire transfers in a "fixed payer, flexible payee" form where you'd get a booklet of them to fill out later, and "flexible payer, fixed payee" form you'd get mailed to your house to pay your bills, only having to write your account number on them, sign it, and mail it to your bank. They were designed to be machine-readable from the start for easy processing at the bank, and one of the ways they did this was by having all the fixed data encoded in a special font. When we started using smartphone banking apps, you'd just be able to scan a bill with your phone and it'd immediately read out all the data, fill in the missing stuff, and you'd only have to tap "confirm" to do the actual payment.

onion2k 2y ago

Around the same time (2001) I worked for a startup that was doing the same thing but with Flash instead of HTML. We were building European export forms. People really liked the UI side of it.

crote 2y ago

In my country we used to have a heavily standardized type of money transfer card. It'd be used both for regular wire transfers in a "fixed payer, flexible payee" form where you'd get a booklet of them to fill out later, and "flexible payer, fixed payee" form you'd get mailed to your house to pay your bills, only having to write your account number on them, sign it, and mail it to your bank. They were designed to be machine-readable from the start for easy processing at the bank, and one of the ways they did this was by having all the fixed data encoded in a special font. When we started using smartphone banking apps, you'd just be able to scan a bill with your phone and it'd immediately read out all the data, fill in the missing stuff, and you'd only have to tap "confirm" to do the actual payment.