User Experience Success: Mint.com has made “doing the bills” a joint effort
In our household, I manage the bills. Years ago I installed Quicken on my Mac and used it as a central way for managing all of our finances: credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, investments, loans, etc. To this day, it is still the primary financial management software I use.
Since my wife was never one to enjoy talking about our bills, and because I had always done it, there was never really a way for her to easily become engaged in the process which she neither liked or, quite frankly, was good at! Then came along Mint.com.
I’m the DBA, she’s the business user
The relationship we’ve had prior to the use of Mint.com was very much like the DBA (Database Administrator) and the Business User requesting reports. Businesses with poor business intelligence and reporting solutions suffer from inundating DBAs (Database Administrators) with writing queries and developing custom reports every time a business user wants to see sales performance vs. a budget.
Without an easy-to-use reporting solution businesses suffer when Business Users are not engaged in analyzing data. The same was true here — Quicken, a desktop application, had no user-friendly way of distributing budgeting or reporting data on a regular basis to my wife. I had to be the one to generate it because, simply put, the user experience and usability was just not where it needed to be for her to be engaged.
Mint.com is the dashboard we needed for our personal finances
While my wife still doesn’t dare open Quicken to manage our finances, Mint.com offers us easy, straight-forward access to balance alerts and budgeting. What’s even better is the iPhone app where she can quickly pull up our budget for the month while she’s out shopping and have instant understanding of where we are financially. This, combined with weekly summaries of spending vs. budget puts our finances at her fingertips without the complexity of knowing how to use Quicken.
User experience & usability win, again.
The Mint.com model is proof that simplicity in an application that is easy to use is a winning combination. As was pointed out by adaptive path, Quicken’s acquisition of Mint.com this past week equated to $5 Million value per employee, making an incredible case of user experience being the winning anecdote to Mint.com’s success.
Take a complicated process, make it easy, and you will win.
Mint won our family over by taking the complication of weekly bills and budgeting by making it quick, fun, and easy to understand. Online businesses that focus on similar principles will trump their competition.
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