User Interface of the Day #5: Mint

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Ever wanted a quick, convenient way to monitor your spending habits? Mint.com, a free, online money management tool, allows you to do just that. Connected to over 3,500 US financial institutions, Mint updates your account information nightly, and automatically categorizes all of your purchases so that you can track how much your Starbucks habit is costing you. Last month, Mint was featured as one of the TechCrunch40 showcase of start-ups; reports say that new features will be added next week. So, is it awesome, or what? Read on.

Andrew Wilson

What’s Cool: Mint’s interactive elements are brilliantly done — after your initial set-up, there’s little to do except occasionally correct some things. Instead of having widgets flying all over the place, the interfaces are minimal and easy to use. There’s almost no data entry — my information is updated automatically. Perhaps my favorite feature, though, is the graph on the overview page showing my “spending progress.” It’s an incredibly compact and easy-to-ready presentation of complex but important information.

What’s Not Cool: The pie charts are terrible — the colors are extremely low-contrast, so it’s difficult to distinguish categories. And I really wish they had made that “spending progress” graph a larger feature of the Spending Trends interface–or even a feature at all.

So? This is what I wish Quicken was. Elegant and simple, there is a coherent notion of a general ledger. And I am genuinely impressed by how accurate their automatic transaction classifying algorithm is; I rarely have to correct it. My only fiddly recommendation would be to put the magnifying glass icon next to the search box, to clearly connect the search process to the “filtering” feature (which is, thankfully, just a search — well done).

Aza Raskin

What’s Cool: The long list of categories on the “Categorizing Transactions” page is stunning! Usually, instead of seeing a big, well-organized list like Mint’s, you get a bunch of drop-down menus. Here, there’s no Hick’s Law penalty — the information you need is all there. If you want to skip directly to the category you want, you can just Control-F your way there.

What’s Not Cool: Regarding the “spending trends” screens, Mint needs to take a lesson from Tufte — it’s a very widgety, overly interactive form of data presentation that involves too many useless clicks and lots of waiting for silly animations. The navigation tabs are very slow to click between; although some lag is excusable on the web, this crosses the line and approaches irritating. I’m not a big fan of their overuse of the transparent overlays — I watched Andrew spend a lot of time trying to target to the “X” in the corner to close them. Lastly, there’s no way to undo a deletion of an account, which is a big problem. They are currently using warnings, which are known to fail. Your data is critically important, especially since the banks don’t keep it beyond 30 or 90 days.

So? Overall, I like Mint. It could use a better method of displaying quantitative information, and it’s definitely better at letting you explore your financials than at letting you answer a particular question you might have. Right now, there is just too much fiddling. I would like to see semantic reports via restricted natural language parsing — I want to be able to type, “how much did I spend at Starbucks per month?”, in the same way that I can type “5p.m. dinner with Asa Jasa” when adding an event to my 30boxes calendar.

Lauri Apple

What’s Cool: If you’re trying to modify your spending habits to better match the life that you would like to lead, Mint can act as a pretty reliable personal finance trainer. And for the amount of information it provides, its interface is remarkably clutter-free. Adding accounts and building your profile is very easy, so you can get started using this site immediately.

What’s Not Cool: I found a few errors in my transactions report, which undermines the point of Mint. If you’re like me and you don’t have much money to spend in the first place, a misplaced $5 charge can throw off the calculations just enough to make those pie chart graphs and bar graphs pretty useless. Also, the “ways to save” advice seemed to be more like a passive plug for Discover. Both Andrew and I were encouraged to try out Discover’s services; no other suggestions were forthcoming.

So? Fixing whatever is prompting inaccurate data would obviously be useful. Also, in time, I’d like to see other benefits such as counters to track your credit card rewards programs data. You know, so I can see how much more I have to spend before qualifying for that ticket to Aruba.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to review the UI. I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback from all of you. This is a great site.

I share your consensus on the trends graphs, I can’t say much about where that is headed but I hear you loud and clear. I have Tufte’s book but I recommend Stephen Few’s “Show Me the Numbers”.

Mint.com will continue to evolve from user feedback so keep it coming! Feel free to contact me directly with any insights anytime.

Jason M. Putorti
Lead Designer, Mint.com

I find that I have to correct the categorizations pretty regularly, and the UI for this is really frustrating! Maybe my monitor size isn’t keeping up with the Joneses, but I’m always having to scroll to one end of the screen or another just to recategorize things. Why not edit-in-place fields that complete themselves as I type?

Otherwise: a better Quicken than Quicken, by a mile.

Does it not scare anyone that you have to supply your login information for your bank accounts?

I’d sort of like to try this site out, but I don’t like the idea of handing over my username/password.

Did anyone else find it difficult to answer security questions that you can’t fully see? Here is a screenshot of what I’m talking about:

I can’t find a way to make that tiny little box bigger.

Sorry, the image got cut out from the comment. Here is the screenshot URL: http://www.uinotebook.com/images/mint_menu.png.

Natasha– That is an acknowledged issue. We had not originally required those security questions when we launched, but then a few users were reporting connection failures so engineering put them back in, but there were layout issues with Internet Explorer not expanding the select options. v1.1 is being rolled out October 23, I’m really happy with it, please give it a try then! Thanks for your input!

Jason M. Putorti
Lead Designer, Mint.com

Jason,
I can’t use Mint because it won’t log into either of my banks. The interface gives my just an error, while tech support lets me know (3 days later*) that the banks are not supported for the time being because they are giving you “trouble.”

If that is the case your sign-up/sign-in process should just tell me and offer an email when you do get it working.

I would bet that you loose 50% of potential customers with the initial log-in error and 49% of customers who never bother checking to see if you got it working.

It is also rather disturbing that Mint could stop functioning tomorrow. The old dentist comparison is rather apt for how I feel about financials and setting up another program makes me just stuck with Moneydance.

You could fix all this by offering Direct OFX support. I would even be willing to pay for it (especially if my support emails were bumped to the top of the queue.) Not that you should stop working on your screen scraping method- many banks still do not offer Direct OFX.

Your automagical categorization method sounds nice but one of my problems with other financial software is the inability to tweak their categorization algorithms. If I buy gas and groceries all from the same store I can define the variables to define which is which but I am sure you cannot.

Finally Aza was being nice when he said, “… using warnings, which are known to fail.” and “Your data is critically important, especially since the banks don’t keep it beyond 30 or 90 days.”

They are not just known to fail, it is a fact that they will fail, and my data isn’t sacred, it’s my time and energy- just think of asking a user to do any extra work/ spend extra time with their financial software as asking them to cut themselves just one more time with a razor blade. If you embraced that as your guiding philosophy you will go far.

-Indo
*Torture is a good way to extract money from people, I would pay for better support, and I am a poor college student! You are in a unique position to impose sliding scale fees… ; )

I signed up for an account at mint and found it totally useless. I’m betting bank of america isn’t the only major banks that already has the spending charts/categorization included so if I was going to fiddle with that I may as well do it at the BOA website. (Many of my transactions were not correct but I try to shop at primarily local businesses so I guess that is to be expected.) My citibank credit card didn’t work for a few days, and I was really annoyed that I couldn’t see which financial institutions they sync with before I signed up.

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