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.
Usability Challenge: When your products can be made in over 100 billion combinations
(This is the first post in a series in which I intend to review online product configurators across industries. We've built a product configurator from the ground up because no viable off-the-shelf options were available for our complex products. This has resulted in complete immersion of website usability, consumer insights, and an intimate understanding of the challenges in offering made-to-order products online.)
I work in the home decor industry, blinds and shades in particular. The shopping process for understanding, selecting, ordering, and installing custom blinds and shades can be daunting if it's unclear what is available to you as a consumer. Plus, when it comes to home decor and fashion, there is a lot of emotion involved -- how you furnish your home says a lot about you and your family so the last thing you want to do is make a very expensive design mistake.
More Options = Better. Right?
Not necessarily. However, the Blinds and Shades industry is an old industry rooted in differentiation by product options and colors. In an industry determined to never be outdone by its competitors, window treatment manufacturers both benefit and suffer from being able to cater to the millions of variations of window sizes in consumers' homes to the unique decor tastes of consumers laying down their hard-earned money. The engineering and manufacturing behind the products is complex, but when it comes to presenting an ordering screen to an untrained user, it's a whole new challenge.
DIY Product Configuration & Ordering
The problem that has manifested is an industry offering such confusing products that only a designer or decorator could assist a consumer in purchasing. So, how does one create a website to help DIY'ers who choose to go at it on their own?
When taking all of the products, colors, options, and manufacturing limitations into consideration across 100+ billion ordering combinations, this makes for a very complex product configurator. Mocha or Chocolate colored finish? Inside or out-side mounted installation? Motorized or cordless control mechanism? What type of decor do you have in your room? What type of room will this blind or shade be installed in? If you've gone through the process of outfitting your home with new blinds, you know that it's challenging.
Key components to a product configurator are all about usability
Usability in a product configurator means:
- Showing options with photos or videos
- Offering feature/benefit statements for each option
- Categorize options into digestible steps
- When a conflict is detected, provide messaging in plain English and in a relevant location.
Step 1: Showing options with photos or videos
One of the fundamentals. Consumers will buy what they can see. Case in point, here is a $1,530 "Track Pack" option on the Ford Mustang without pictures:
Step 2: Offering feature/benefit statements for each option
A couple years back I was looking at Ford Mustangs on Ford's website. In the configurator, I was presented with an option of a rearend gear ratio of 3.73. I went back recently and took a screen shot of this because Ford is still doing it. What's wrong with this picture?
I don't know what the factory default rear axle ratio is. Being a "car guy," I know the benefits of gearing up or gearing down, but without being able to compare this option to what's offered by default, it's hard to justify the $495 price tag. I have to leave the product configurator and search around on the site to see if they've listed the default rear axle ratio specifications somewhere.
Step 3: Categorize options into digestible steps
Oh, how it's daunting to enter into a product configurator without an understanding of how many steps or questions there are to answer. Blinds and Shades in particular can be upwards of 25 questions just to get to a completed configuration. The tricky part is dividing the total number of questions into logical buckets or steps. Consumers do not configure products in linear fashion, particularly when comparing pricing online, changing options, and running into option conflicts. They hop around, jumping out of predefined order. It's important to categorize questions so a consumer and quickly remember where they saw an option.
Step 4: When a conflict is detected, provide messaging in plain English and in a relevant location.
Again, Ford is on the right track by showing the conflict, but what is always difficult to decipher is the why behind conflicts like this:
What's happened here is the 3.73 rear axle package is already included in the "Track Pack" option. In order to understand this however, I have to separately click on the "Track Pack" option and the "Rear Axle Package" option to see if I can come to my own conclusion as to why these two options cannot be ordered together.
In the case of blinds and shades, I've configured a Cellular Shade that is 83" wide X 60" tall:
I've chosen the "cordless top down/bottom up" option but I see an error message that explains the why behind the conflict, not simply "this option cannot be ordered." It allows me to either alter my measurements on my shade or choose another control option. I don't have to click around on the options to understand why this particular option cannot be ordered.
Amerock.com Usability Update
Earlier this year the Amerock.com website become another branded site that our E-Business team was to manage. The challenge that came with this responsibility was migrating the "look and feel" of the existing site to a different platform. What entailed was about a week of work to craft a new set of stylesheets that essentially made the "new" site look nearly identical to the old site.
We did however take liberties in updating products based on new product rollouts and added functionality that didn't previous exist. Here are some before and after screen shots:
Product Navigation (Old)
Old site consisted of a 4-layer navigation schema:
- Choose Product Category
- Choose Product Type
- Filter Product List (Choose 1 Finish, Style, and/or Collection)
- View Product (See details, finishes, etc.)
The problem with this style of navigation is it forced the end-user to make too narrow their product selection too soon in the process just to see a product list. Finish coordination across product types is important in cabinet hardware, so the desire to see "all products with a satin nickel finish" needed to be possible. With the old site, this could not be done.
Above we see Decorative Hardware product types.
Here we see a product listing, but we can only choose from thedrop-down menus for further filtering options.
And here we see product details with finishes. Lots of unused real estate.
Product Navigation (new)
A simple 2-step process exists:
- Choose Product Category (from the main navigation of the site)
- Select multiple filters and see your product results
Select multiple filters across multiple filter types. An additional bonus is seeing the filter "counts" so there's no guesswork when you're clicking on options wondering if you will see any additional product results or not.
Clear visibility in the left-hand navigation of what filters are selected and which product results you're viewing. Additionally, there are "results per page" options as well.
Product comparison also didn't exist on the old site. It is now available on the new site.
Image zooming was also unavailable on the old site. Thanks to Adobe Scene7's dynamic image zooming technology, we use it on all product pages to enable the end-user to zoom in on-the-fly on the product image.
Table Stakes
It seems odd to be showing some of the above features as they are mostly "table stakes" features these days. However, there are many large e-commerce sites that still do not offer simple things like product image zooming, unlimited product comparison functionality (do I really need to be limited to comparing 3 products at a time so the site design stays scaled proportionately?), and "results per page" customizations. Amerock.com is now fairly level-set with these "table stakes" features an we begin the continuous improvement with repeatable processes.
Web 2.0 Users/Consumers in the Enterprise
The last 2 years in web startups and general usability improvements online have been fascinating. A product of this innovation period is a consumer/userbase of individuals who come to expect the same experience out of every web-based application they use online and at their day jobs. I love the passion!
There was a good post and subsequent discussion started at this blog asking "Why do enterprise applications suck?"
There is no disputing that most enterprise apps are terrible. Let's examine why:
- Enterprise applications span careers. Very rarely do you get an opportunity to start at ground zero in the enterprise with an application. Web startups have the luxury of starting with a blank sheet of paper. In the enterprise, you're either integrating with legacy systems or building on existing processes that are engrained in the business. Furthermore, long-tenured "champions" are hard to come by as it relates to enterprise applications which brings me to my next point:
- Enterprise applications are inherited. In my case, I've inherited a handful of applications from predecessors who inherited applications from their predecessors. Often times in the enterprise, applications that have been in production have years of usage behind them and are tightly woven into day-to-day business processes. Well, there must be documentation on how the software operates, right? Not quite.
- Enterprise applications are wide in focus. Most web-based startups are narrow in their focus. In the enterprise, one solution rarely fits all needs and business processes, so you're forced to do patchwork between disparate technologies. The startups that try to be "all things to all people" ultimately fail. Look at these lists of startups out of TechStars and you'll find that they're all laser-beam focused. Enterprise application providers are selling "one size fits all" solutions to corporate clients, so don't plan on there being a community of "theme developers" for your enterprise app like there are for WordPress blogs.
- In the early days, the enterprise valued function over form. Looking back as little as 5 years ago, companies were still just discovering web technologies. When going from a manual, paper-based process to your first automated, electronic solution, everyone's going to love it. Fast forward a few years and here we are, usability stewards with high expectations of web application usability. We've been spoiled with free services from the Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and other online entities.
There's a paradigm shift taking place with the expectations of applications
The evolving nature of web applications is no different than any other maturing industry. Automotive manufacturers experienced the same challenges. Early automobiles valued function: getting you from point A to point B. As that became the standard, automobiles had to differentiate on other features. Early enterprise applications valued function, however in the world of applications, advancements are not measured in decades like automobiles, they are measured in years or even months.
The enterprise will catch up.
Just like most consumers don't rush out and buy the latest car or truck to take advantage of the latest and greatest innovations from the manufacturer, enterprises aren't going to invest in software upgrades that don't promise increased top-line sales or improved bottom line results.
That 1999 model year vehicle still serves its purpose -- insurance is cheap, you have no car payments, and it still runs despite the occasional service it requires. The bells and whistles in new automobiles sure are attractive but they just aren't enough to sway you to make the plunge for a new automobile. The same thinking is taking place in the enterprise with regards to the applications the organization invested in years ago.
SuperMotors.net facelift for the new year
Today we launched an updated look and feel to SuperMotors.net (a site which I'm one of three owners of and work on in my spare time as a hobby):
New ad size: 300x250
In addition to new features and functionality added to the site, we've also incorporated 300x250 banner ads. Since I run this site as a hobby-based business, it's important that we generate revenue from as many different sources as possible in order to pay for operational costs.
How will the economy impact banner ad revenue?
With the economy going the way it is, we've seen a text link-based company (ZTMC Marketing) pull ads from our site due to client cut backs. Fortunately, we are diverse in our implementation of ad networks. We run ads from Tribal Fusion, ADSDAQ, Casale Media, Google AdSense, ShoppingAds, and Text-Link-Ads.
This is part of the reason we've expanded to offering the 300x250 banner ad size (in addition to 728x90 and 160x600). We now have additional inventory heading into the first of the year when our traffic typically peaks (due to enthusiasts staying indoors during the winter months).
Blog by Eric Long
I'm an experienced digital product & marketing strategist and am passionate about providing outstanding cross-channel, mass customization (product configurators), and considered-purchase experiences.
About Eric Long
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