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Comment by Enginerrrd | Hacker News Reader

We tried using vanguard. The UX/UI was so bad we went through the work of transferring everything to fidelity. They've got a pretty decent app.

Vanguard has so much friction on what should be very simple and common tasks.

There's no excuse for that. I can say pretty confidently that cutting fees won't be enough. They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff, and they probably need to revamp their customers service as well. They screwed up my wife's name and she tried for months and months to fix it before giving up.

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Vanguard recently made two horrible mistakes: 1. a typical "Grand UI Redesign" that made the site worse and removed a bunch of previously working features, and 2. They made all their users "migrate" their accounts from one type to another, a process that I found to be error prone and clunky.

For 1, all of us software people have seen companies do this over and over, and it always sucks. For 2, why they couldn't do whatever backend migration they needed to do without having it disrupting retail customers, I have no idea.

Both of those point to a software organization way below where it needs to be competence-wise.

Vanguard's grand UI redesign was poorly done. At the time each team was responsible for some software product, and had a good ownership model. The issue imo was that the internal UI component library was poorly made and funded, and that the UX team was very old (most of the people were lifers that were hired in the 90s, no real experience in UI/UX,etc.) So people were just making the designs they were given. The Grand UI Redesign was a single new team that just made a heavy Angular UI application for the major areas, forcing product teams to be backend only. This caused discontinuity and didn't really fix the core issue.

I've had the same Vanguard accounts for 15 years (Rollover IRAs, Roth IRAs, non-retirement) and I don't remember having to migrate anything. If something was migrated, I wasn't even aware it happened.

That's because Vanguard is a buy and hold philosophy. They have previously stated that they designed their site for the bulk of the users. Those users log in just to check their balances in the 5 or fewer funds/ETFs that they hold. So instead of building something that would be reasonably easy for everyone, they built something that was easy for their primary (aging) user base. It's the same sort of mentality how they don't allow inverse ETFs, they aren't going to offer any crypto related stuff, etc.

At some point you need to realize your gains—perhaps to rebalance a portfolio, or to pay for an expense, or because you’re retiring and now it’s time to enjoy the profits of your buying and holding. And a lot of people elect specific-lot cost basis accounting to minimize tax burden.

Supposedly they have a tax loss harvesting and "min tax" tool for that.

The “tool” was sorting your lots by cost basis, which is what Enginerrrd is saying was taken away.

I would guess it's still there but buried in some UX hell hole

I did some rebalancing recently, and couldn't find it. You can sort by capital gain per lot, which isn't very helpful if your lots are vastly different sizes. Thankfully I don't have that many lots, and had plenty of capital loss carryover to offset the gains, so it doesn't matter that much, but it's annoying, and it's probably the straw that's going to get me to actually move to a better brokerage. (which I guess is fine for Vanguard, if I'm at a different brokerage, it reduces Vanguard's costs)

They can't even correctly donate from a Vanguard brokerage account to a Vanguard DAF without breaking the cost basis.

> They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff,

They've done that. And now you can't sort by capital gain/loss per share when picking lots to sell.

They're also almost done forcing everyone into the brokerage side, which is less flexible with some things like reinvestment of dividends. On the nice side, it includes foreign dividend info on the 1099s so you don't have to find a separate document to get those percentages.

The idea of making financial decisions based on UI/UX is extraordinary to me.

It is to me too! I would never do that normally. It's just that it was THAT bad.

It took me MONTHS to figure out how to sell a particular fund to buy another one. Somehow every time I tried to do it, it failed. I kept coming back to it over and over and different things went wrong. It was also very difficult to figure out the status of an order.

It was literally that clunky, and I've been trading for decades. I run multiple businesses, I know how these things work, but their UI was awful.

Twice I've been unsure how to move move money with their site and twice I've contacted their customer service center who was more than happy to guide me through the process.

This particular one was only a few thousand dollars worth, and so the issue just never reached a high enough priority for me to invest the time to call ciatomer service.

I just kept checking it once in a while when i had a few seconds to spare.

I guess you’ve never had the displeasure of using treasurydirect.gov.

It's slightly better now. I think they removed the onscreen keyboard and finally let you type your password directly.

But it's still bad.

Do you like radio buttons? I hope you like radio buttons.

Even if the thing that you're using for really, really shouldn't be a radio button.

Vanguard's website revamp in the past three years was disappointing because in the past, I can visit just one (landing) page and get almost all of the info I need about my holdings + actions I could take on them and my accounts. Now, I have to click through a myriad of pages to do what I want. Plus, in Firefox browser at least, if you want to 'Exit' the order and some other pages, it simply doesn't work, so I have to type the 'vanguard.com' in the browser's URL field and ping it again.

This is an example of not breaking what was not broken (or at least, keep most of what was useful instead of replacing everything with "new and cool" stuff just because <no reason?>).

> Vanguard's website revamp in the past three years was disappointing because in the past, I can visit just one (landing) page and get almost all of the info I need about my holdings + actions I could take on them and my accounts.

Bookmark https://holdings.web.vanguard.com/

It's so bad. I don't even like logging in anymore. Padding/whitespace everywhere, no more alternating row colors. I despise mobile-first UIs. The old one many have looked dated but it was more information dense without being overwhelming.

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