The $100, 000 Keying Error

A lthough it sounds disastrous, making a $100,000 mistake seems relatively minor when stockbrokers have lost millions by hitting the wrong key. The following case proved to be different, however. An ordinary bank customer, Grete Fossbakk, used Internet banking to transfer a large amount to her daughter. She keyed one digit too many into the account number field, however, inadvertently sending the money to an unknown person. This individual managed to gamble away much of the sum before police confiscated the remainder. Subsequently, the case received extensive media coverage in Norway. The Minister of Finance criticized the bank’s user interface and requested new and improved Internet banking regulations. Suddenly, the risk to Internet banking had become apparent to both the government and ordinary citizens. Clearly, the user made a slip. She also had the chance to correct the typo before she hit the confirm button. However, as we shall see, the system also had every opportunity to catch her mistake. Yet this did not happen. The system’s developers had neglected to build in a simple check that would detect if the correct input were missing. This case raises questions about what the minimum validation procedures from a banking system developed for ordinary users should be. It also challenges us, as system designers, to help users avoid such errors. Today’s users operate alone in front of a computer, with intermediates and colleagues replaced by computer systems. This new reality makes it important to have interfaces that can offer as good as—or even better—error detection than that found in previous manual systems.