Leesome?

Update: Dwolla contacted me soon after this post and put out an update to this issue the next week. Shout out to Dwolla!

I’ve been using Dwolla for the past few months to pay rent on my co-working space and I feel I need a space to vent my frustrations. If their transaction fee wasn’t so low (25 cents), I would switch to a more familiar payment processor since their user experience is so poor.

Dwolla’s central promise of being able to send money to anyone, anywhere is appealing. However, the execution is a little bit off. Often times, I don’t need to send money to anyone, anywhere. I just need to send money to a select group of people.

Here is a screenshot of my Dwolla transaction history, showing payments made for my co-working space.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The phone numbers are all the same, but for some reason Dwolla doesn’t recognize that the 812 number belongs to Kristen (to whom I pay my rent). This is unnerving since Dwolla can’t seem to keep track of people’s names and associated phone numbers, I have no idea if they payment went out or not. Dwolla has already lost my trust by missing this important part of user experience, so I don’t have faith the rest of the service works. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t; we’re still trying to sort out how payments work on this thing)

Why do the other payments show Kristen’s name and not this most recent one? I have no idea.

Even more unnerving is the drop-down menu when you go to pay someone.

As mentioned in the image, none of these are the right Kristen! It seems logical that the most recent people I paid would float to the top of the autocomplete list, or at least be in the list at all, but I guess it’s more important for Dwolla to show me random users that are also named Kristen in the off-chance I want to send them $200 for rent in the co-working space.

So here are my requests for a better Dwolla user experience:

• Link together names and phone numbers. When you don’t, I am greatly worried that I am sending money to random people because I typed a phone number one digit off.
• Maintain a list of people I have recently sent money to so I can easily send them money again.
• Have people I’ve recently sent money to float to the top of the autocomplete, or at least have them exist in the autocomplete.

So now it’s July 2nd, the money sent to Kristen’s phone number has still not arrived (nor has it shown up in her payment history). We’re now trying to see if Dwolla will recognize the e-mail address associated with Kristen’s account.

Thanks Dwolla, for not providing an easy way for me to send money to people I have sent money to previously and for making your user interface terrifying by not linking up names and phone numbers/Dwolla IDs.

Update: Dwolla contacted me soon after this post and put out an update to this issue the next week. Shout out to Dwolla!