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.
Talend Secures $12 Million in Funding
I was happy to read that Talend secured $12 Million in funding. We've long been a proponent of Talend, beginning in early 2008 completely gutting home-grown ETL and Middleware applications and processes by leveraging the open source tool. With quotes on ETL software from the big boys coming in north of $200K, the open source investment (we essentially pay for a "pro" version of the server along with enterprise support -- substantially less than $200K).
There is a place for open source in the enterprise. As development shops seek to be more agile, budget-conscious, and innovative this year, the ability to move quickly and without the sometimes bureaucratic-funding-approval-process is important. "Do more with less" remains an important mantra in '09 in IT just as it did in '08.
The three pillars of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) is going to evolve into a critical asset for businesses in the coming months as companies begin to hunker down and trim the fat while we all ride out this recession. Now more than ever we require business intelligence.
Many businesses fail to understand or are able to justify the value of an implementation of BI software. Instead, decisions are based off of "gut feel," advertising and marketing decisions are made based on "how we've always done it," and at the foundation of it all: inadequate intelligence.
Want to see Business Intelligence (BI) in action? Visit a hospital.
After spending 5 hours at the hospital this week for a "false alarm" (my wife is pregnant), I was fascinated by the uterine contraction machine that the hospital staff had hooked up to my wife's stomach. Through a series of sensors, this machine was hooked up to a PC and displayed a real-time readout of fetal heart rate and contractions both on the monitor and via a continuous printout on paper.
As my wife would wince with the pain that each contraction brought with it, the machine readout was right-on. Occasionally, I would see the contraction monitor start moving up (indicating a contraction was building) before she would feel it. Furthermore, over time we could see the frequency in which contractions were happening which enabled the doctors to see important trends with the contractions. As we began to recognize the trends, we could predict the next contraction for my wife within a 20-second range.
At no point were we left wondering whether the contractions were consistent or not, or how long they were lasting. It made me realize that if this was not a hospital room and if we were at any random business, chances are we'd be making decisions based on little or no data.
The three pillars of Business Intelligence execution
Our hospital visit showed "business intelligence" at its finest. In this particular case, this was a basic implementation of intelligence gathering, but essentially BI breaks down into the following:
- Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) -- in this case when we were at the hospital, there were 2: fetal heart rate & contractions
- Implement a method of collecting data -- the monitoring machine
- Implement a reporting tool so you can analyze the data to base your decisions off of -- by evaluating the printed graphs from the machine, the doctor could identify trends with the contractions and determine if she was progressing with labor (in our case, it was a false alarm)
Do you have KPIs set for your business, department, website, advertising, or social media initiatives?
If you haven't identified KPIs for running your business, then collecting data and reporting against it do very little if you can't convert the data to insights. For example, consider the following scenarios when viewed in isolation, they may sound like accomplishments. Often times, quantity/volume or completion is used as a universal KPI:
- You just sold 100,000 units of XYZ widget!
- What if XYZ widget has a Gross Margin (GM) of only 5%? 10,000 units sold at 50% margin (at the same price) is just as profitable. Volume can often times be misleading because the effort that goes into selling 100,000 units can be far greater than 10,000 units.
- Your department just completed a critical project on time!
- Great, the deadline has been met. Does that mean success? Not necessarily. If each member of your department has just spent the last 6 weeks working 80-hour weeks, this is not success -- it's burnout.
- Your website had 100,000 unique visitors to your website yesterday!
- Unique visitors to your website mean nothing if you're not measuring the "next step" in the conversion funnel of your site. What does your website exist to accomplish? Generate leads? Sell products? Provide product support? Unique visits that don't convert to sales or brand advocates are just a waste of bandwidth.
- Your TV ad ran during the SuperBowl!
- How much did you spend on the ad and how many sales can be attributed to the ad? Don't know? Then running an ad during the SuperBowl is not a success.
- Your social media campaign generated 5,000,000 impressions!
- Like your TV ad that ran during the SuperBowl, how much was invested in this campaign and what time frame are you using to measure the return on the impressions generated from the campaign? Impressions are NOT a KPI for social media unless you can equate an impression to revenue or another unit of measure that is of value to your organization.
Business Intelligence tools
This this is by no means comprehensive but is a start to discovering what's available in the industry for business intelligence solutions (based on the "top of mind" companies). Rarely will you find a "one size fits all" approach -- often times you'll find yourself utilizing several niche tools, particularly as you get into advertising and marketing campaigns.
Pillar #1: KPI Tools
There's no software that can tell you what your KPIs should be for your business. KPIs vary widely by industry, type of business, department, and ultimately boil down to what you're being measured to produce.
Pillar #2: Data Warehousing Tools
This is an important pillar, and there are many options available for data warehousing. A simple Google search for the topic produces many vendors who play in this space. Visit the Wikipedia entry for this subject and check out these vendor offerings:
- Open Source
- Commercial
Pillar #3: Reporting & Analysis Tools
Once the data is collected, you must have the tools to report and analyze the data. It's one thing to see your KPIs, but the real skill behind Business Intelligence is the ability to correlate this data, mine the data, and discover information and trends you otherwise might have never known.
- Businesses & Department-Level Tools (See my BI links on delicious.com)
- Website Tools (See my web analytics links on delicious.com)
- Open Source / Free
- Commercial
- Advertising, marketing campaign measurement tools
- Social Media measurement tools
- Nielson BuzzMetrics
- BuzzLogic
- Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Analyst) has a string of blog posts on this topic covering the likes of twitter, blogging, and most other hot technologies struggling to prove their ROI to the business world
Parenting like a product manager
In a discussion with a friend/coworker this week on our way to lunch, we were chatting about the annual review process and merit increases at our company. He had made the comment that his parents jokingly compare his salary to his sister's salary (who evidently makes considerably more than him). I then went off on a tangent and wondered what it would be like if parents treated their kids like product managers treated their products? It made for an amusing conversation and poked fun at the day-to-day marketing world we live in:
ROI of parenting (evaluating "performance" of a son/daughter)
Like product managers, parents could look at the time they were investing in their children and begin measuring their return on investment (ROI). If their daughter was outperforming their son in grades, relationships, etc., like a product manager, the parents would focus additional efforts in their son in an effort to boost performance. At some point however, the son does risk being cast aside as a "laggard." The daughter also risks attention and her performance could suffer due to the extra attention being paid to their son. It's a constant balance of determining where time is maximized on your products (children)!
Correlating performance to self esteem (like correlating product sales to consumer confidence)
With the economy heading south like it has been, we begin to see more product managers correlate consumer confidence to purchases of their products to help explain a downturn in top-line sales.
What if parents measured their son or daughter's self esteem and correlated it with their performance?
If self esteem has a direct correlation to performance, then how can you "move the needle" like a product manager "moves the needle" in a down economy? A trip to Disney World, of course (sort of like a discount or rebate on a product)! Take a look:
Other market conditions may be influencing performance
Some parents may be quick to jump to conclusions like many product managers, however. One may look at this and say "If we take more trips to Disney World, I can create consistent lift in performance regardless of self esteem conditions." This would be the equivalent to always offering a discount on your product -- the risk is the behavior of the consumer becomes one of not purchasing unless a discount is offered.
The last thing a parent wants to do is have their son or daughter get in the mindset of only performing well shortly after a Disney World vacation. Product marketing and parenting is a tricky balance of priorities and market conditions.
Sometimes we just have to sit back and laugh at ourselves and the marketing world we live in.
What is E-Business?
Defining E-Business can be difficult because of the many meanings it carries in various organizations. The following definition is what I use to describe the wide net E-Business casts over an organization and operates under the assumption that E-Business is closely aligned with or organizationally structured within the Marketing Department:
Role of E-Business:
E-Business drives multichannel sales, new customer acquisition, brand recognition and loyalty, and customer retention.
The 5 Pillars of E-Business
- 1.) BI & Analytics (learn more) (Updated 2/1/2011)
- Database management
- Business Intelligence
- Competitive Intelligence
- Web Analytics
- 2.) Design & User Experience (more information) (Updated 12/17/2011)
- Content Strategy
- User Experience (UX) & Design
- Information Architecture (IA)
- Interaction Design
- Visual Design
- Usability Testing
- 3.) Technology (more information) (Updated 12/17/2011)
- Web & Application Development
- Data Modeling
- Data Warehousing & ETL
- Product Data Management
- System Integration
- Operations (Order placement, order processing, & supply chain management)
- 4.) E-Marketing (more information) (Updated 12/17/2011)
- CRM
- Email Marketing
- SEM, SEO, Online Advertising
- Social Media Management & Monitoring (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
- 5.) Conversion (more information) (Updated 4/24/10)
- Online Merchandising
- E-Commerce
- Internal Site Search
- A/B & Multivariate Testing
Blog by Eric Long
I'm an experienced online marketer, information architect, digital strategist, and social media enthusiast. I'm passionate about providing outstanding cross-channel experiences for considered purchases (with a focus on mass customization).
About Eric Long
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