Aaron Forth leads the product team that’s responsible for Mint.com. Mint is an award winning personal finance web site and, for yours truly, the location of countless hours lost to the joy of poking around in one’s personal data. Just a few weeks ago Mint got even more addictive—with a slew of enhancements that offer up new ways to budget and analyze your green. In this interview, Aaron shares a bit about the challenges and opportunities of designing a (really, truly) consumer friendly personal finance application.

Leah Buley

Jump to: Adaptive Path News | Selections From Our Blog | What We're Reading
The UX of Personal Finance: An Interview with Aaron Forth from Mint.com

Leah Buley [LB]: So, Aaron, personal finances can be kind of a dry topic for some people.  What’s the appeal of financial services software for you personally?

Aaron Forth [AF]: Well, I’m a Quicken refugee.  I was somebody who spent years entering data into the Quicken ledger, and I found that at the end of all that I didn’t know really what I was getting out of it. It’s a personal problem that I had great interest in solving for myself, and so that made me very interested in solving it for others. I don’t think that Americans in general can claim that we are doing very well with personal finances.  Helping people get in control and approach their finances without being overwhelmed with guilt or fear or frustration felt like it could have an impact.

LB: It seems like talking about your personal financial situation is so taboo.  You can talk about health problems.  You can talk about your sex life.  But you’re not allowed to talk about what you make or whether you’re on track with your budget. Why do you suppose that is?

AF: The topic is completely loaded.  It triggers all kinds of emotions. There’s a lot of guilt, a lot of frustration.  And sometimes there’s joy.  There’s a lot of love for Mint, but there’s a lot of loving it and hating it at the same time, because it turns on the light and shows the reality.  So in the design of Mint,  we focus a lot on making that entry into ones reality a little bit more approachable.

LB: How do you do that?

AF: In Mint, I think the most iconic thing is the interactive pie chart. There are a lot of things that make the pie chart special.

First, it represents all of your spending across all of your accounts. That’s visibility and access that I don’t think people have had in the past. Seeing across all your multiple checking accounts and savings accounts and credit cards is a perspective that would take hours to see in a spreadsheet. We try do it in four minutes or less.

Second, we try to categorize your transactions as accurately as we can without having you tell us what to do.  I think in other applications that attempt to do this, once you get all your transactions together they’re in one big glob and you have to sort through all of it in order to make sense of the categorical breakdowns.

But those are mere mechanics.

The key thing about the pie chart is that it doesn’t show all the information at once. You can wade into it bit by bit.   You can start at the top level, which is the major categories, and then when you drill down into those categories you start to see the sub categories where you’re spending.  And the pie chart tells you who you’re spending with and how often you’re going there.  If somebody goes to Starbucks 400 times in eight months, that’s a number that’s pretty interesting to people, and it has the potential to affect behavior.

LB: This topic of how information affects behavior is interesting. Mint does a good job at turning data into insight, but once you have you have the insight, what do you do with it?  Do people change the way they’re managing their finances as a result of interacting with Mint?

AF: Absolutely.  Yeah.  That’s what we want. Mint in its initial state was very much an analysis tool.  It helped you understand where the money’s going and where it’s coming from, what you’re earning and what you’re spending.  But what we wanted to do is try to affect people’s behaviors.  We fundamentally believe that the reason you work so hard in life is to enjoy the financial benefits of doing that work.  Whether your goals are to put your kid in college or be able to buy a home or to afford a nice car and put good food on the table, achieving those goals is where Mint wants to help people. The way we do this is by highlighting and focusing on the insights on current behavior, and then promoting actions that people can take to make change a reality.

LB: Within Mint I can definitely see where the design promotes that insight about current spending patterns and opportunities to save, but what about the long view– seeing the long-term benefits of those actions?

AF:The stuff that we’re in progress with right now is really about allowing people to express their goals in life—not necessarily in financial terms, but in human terms—and then helping them to take steps to achieve those sooner. 

So, imagine making trade-offs. What if I didn’t get 40 Starbucks over two months? What would that mean for me to be able to get out of debt? Or to my retirement age? Or to my ability to put my child through college?  It’s too easy to open your wallet and spend. We’re focused on helping people to try to understand the trade offs so, at a minimum, they are aware.

LB: What makes Mint successful? What differentiates it from other folks in this space?

AF: There are lots of things that Mint does that I think are fundamentally different than what others have done.  In terms of some of the other web 2.0 type start-ups that focus on personal finance, many of them have kind of a social aspect to financial management.  Somebody somewhere thinks that they have good financial advice and they can express that financial advice and other people can view it and wade through it and act on it if they want.  It’s kind of like social networking meets personal finance.  We’ve steered very clear of those waters because we don’t know who would be issuing the financial advice and whether it would be good advice in the first place.

With respect to ‘social’ and personal financial management, we do get excited about making it easy for Mint users to gather insights about themselves by comparing their finances to a group of other users in a similar life situation. The value of comparison is part voyeuristic fascination with “how do I compare?”  and part, “now how do I change my behavior!” Personally, when I saw that my spending on auto insurance was quite a bit higher than other people like me, I immediately wanted to know more.  Am I overpaying?  Is there something on my driving record that I don’t know about?  In order to make the insights as accurate as possible, we’re making a bunch of improvements that will allow Minters to compare across more dimensions than  just geographic area (which anyone can do on the site today).  We have enough users now where we can do this and still respect anonymity. So you’ll be able to compare yourself along multiple dimensions.  People who live in San Francisco who work in a profession who have an income range between this and that.  We’ve taken a baby step into it here with our latest enhancements, and once people start to tell us more about themselves we’ll start to expose some of these vectors for comparison.  It’s an interesting voyeuristic thing, but it’s also a compelling way to affect behavior. So you can say, “wow, I’m out of bounds.  My auto insurance is way more expensive than everyone else’s like me,” which creates an impetus for investigation.

Lastly, we’re trying to bring efficiency and transparency to financial services as an industry, and I don’t think that is the same motivation as some of the other applications that are out there. We realize that there’s a lot of confusion and chicanery that’s taken place in the marketing of financial services products.  We make a very conscious effort to strip a lot of that away by providing a quantified approach.  We are simply focused on finding the consumer the best way to save.  Whether we get paid for that or not has no effect on the products that we recommend to you.

LB: You’ll be speaking at UX Week. Can you give us a little preview of what you’ll be talking about?

AF: Part of what I was planning to talk about is how Mint, like no other business that I’ve ever been a part of, is just kind of naturally well aligned.  There’s a big consumer problem. We’re providing a tool that helps to address part of that problem. 

There is a crumbling financial market at least over the last year and a half that has banks looking for high-value customers that are going to help them offset a lot of the junk that they’ve issued over the last couple of years.  There is a confluence of people getting more comfortable with doing stuff online and Mint hinges on security and transparency and the importance of having an aggregated view of your finances.  And people are not going to improve their finances unless they engage with them, so making it nice to look at and fun to play with is a great way to get people engaged—as opposed to just showing them a transaction ledger.

All of which is to say that design is really done for a purpose here.  There are lots of products that are design focused for the purpose of being design focused.  They want to win design awards and stuff like that. But with Mint there’s really a strategy behind it.  If anything it makes design more important.  So at UX Week, I want to highlight the facets of the strategy, the larger company strategy, and why design is such a critical aspect of that. 

Get the FeedAdaptive Path News

AP takes it on the road
So, everyone knows that the UX world converges on San Francisco next week, at our own UX Week event - we will all be here, and you should be, too. But where else can you meet up with us and have a chat over a chai latte (or some other beverage - we don't judge…)?

September 30-October 3

Kate Rutter will be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference in Tucson, AZ.

November 1-2

Leah Buley will be teaching Good Design Faster at User Interface 14 in Boston, MA.

November 16

Leah Buley will be teaching Good Design Faster at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC.

November 24-26

Christian Palino will be speaking on day one at Dethinking Service, Rethinking Design: The First Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation in Oslo.

Does your company want to offer great experiences?
Designing great experiences has become progressively more complex. People expect more from companies and the technologies they employ. They expect companies to coordinate across channels, product lines, and services.

The design challenge becomes both deeper and broader, and we have been growing to meet it. If you worked with us years ago, you might be surprised at the capabilities and perspectives that we have brought into our studios. Why not contact us and see how we can help craft an amazing customer experience for your company?

Get the FeedSelections From Our Blog

• Adaptive Path
  Signposts Ending September 4
• Peter Merholz
  Alexa and Foodspotting Attract Seed Funding Attention!
• Brandon Schauer
  Inverting Social Media: Making It Useful For The Rest
• Andrew Crow
  Metaphors for Storytelling

What We're Reading

• Adweek
  VW in Play; Crispin Won't Defend
• Gartner Newsroom
  Six Approaches to Save Money in Content Management
• Cooper Journal
  The Drawing Board: Fill'er Up
• Wired.com
  The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine