Programming My Life

I love the idea of Mint.com.  I love that their business model is based on anonymous user data. A one stop shop for all of my financial accounts is an amazing convenience for me;  I have five financial institutions whose online services I use.  Finally, having a product that allows me to plan a monthly budget and keeps track of how well I stick to that budget is amazing.  The idea of Mint is great.  Unfortunately, the execution couldn’t be more disappointing.

Mint has been around since 2006, and in November of 2009 it was acquired by Intuit, the makers of Quicken and Turbo Tax according to Wikipedia. I would expect most of Mint’s major functionality issues to be ironed out after four years of development time and now having Intuit’s design experience. In the 5 months that I have had my account, they have not.

One problem I can easily forgive is Mint’s inability to correctly categorize all of my transactions.  Fine, I get it, you don’t know every retailer and what they do.  Even if you did, what if I wanted to categorize things a different way?  This is not a problem.  What is a problem, though, is how I am supposed to categorize purchases.  While I could keep up with every transaction I make in the Transactions tab, I much prefer to check my spending at the end of each month and make changes there.

To do this, I must click the ‘Planning’ tab, go into a preset category (or the default ‘Everything Else’ category) and see individual purchases in each.  Up to this point I have no problems.  Now I re-categorize something.  Great.  Next, I want to go back and check what that purchase was under ‘Shopping’ that seemed like it might need changed to a more specific category.  Where do I go?  I have to go back to the ‘Planning’ tab, go back into the month I was correcting (the default is the current month, and I am usually correcting the previous month), reopen the category I want to see, and finally check the transactions for that subcategory.  After four or five corrections, it becomes apparent just how awful this interface is.

I want to be clear here that I am not an interface designer.  I’ve been doing some minor interface design for work recently, and it has made me realize just how tedious it can be (should I move this text box 5 pixels left? up?) and how much work goes into making it so the user never thinks about it.  It isn’t a flashy job.  Rarely does someone say ‘you know, the placement on that text box was so perfect.’  More likely it will be ‘Oh yes, that was easy to use, but I don’t know why.’  With that out of the way, this is not a minor interface gripe where I think a box should have been moved or something should have been presented in a different way.  When I go into the ‘Planning’ tab, open a category (or categories), then click through to a specific subcategory to change a transaction, there absolutely needs to be a button that brings me back exactly to where I was.

For a simple example of how this design can ruin a project, imagine if Facebook had a similarly designed interface.  I click on Jack’s profile and want to see what his favorite bands are, so I go to his info.  Now I want to see his wall.  The correct design allows me to simply click that tab and go there.  However, with a design analogous to Mint, I would have to go back to my list of friends and find Jack again before I was able to check a different section of his profile.  As much as I might love to waste time on Facebook, I prefer to do so efficiently.

There are other problems I have with Mint (both major and minor), including the lack of a running tally for my accounts, but these pale in comparison to the clunky interface.  Software is meant to be designed so that users can’t get it wrong.  Mint just doesn’t have the ease of use that would make its product great.  For now, I’ll continue going to my individual financial institution sites until Mint can clean up its act.