Mint, an online personal finance site, has gotten a facelift. The new site sports a much cleaner design than the previous iteration, and appears to be focused on describing what Mint actually does rather than presenting pretty (but somewhat overwhelming) graphics. For now the improvements are mainly on the external portion of the site (for non-members), with the members’ portion switching to the new design in the next few weeks.
That normally isn’t big news, but what caught my attention is that Mint has been bucket testing various redesign formats with some users and is seeing conversion rates increase by 20% over the current site.
That equals “hundreds of thousands” of more registered users over the course of a year given their current growth rates, says CEO Aaron Patzer. When we last checked in with them, they had 350,000 registered users and were tracking $11 billion in assets. Those numbers are likely substantially higher now.
Most startups have very limited resources and are so busy building and maintaining core features that they can’t spend too much time doing user testing on various concepts. Sometimes it makes sense to just take a step back and think about usability, though. It can pay off in the end.
Since the site’s launch last year, it has added a number of new features including loan tracking and investment tracking. However, most of these functions haven’t been readily apparent to most users - something the new design is looking to remedy.
Mint allows users to keep track of their finances, presenting spending history with attractive graphs and typically requiring much less effort compared to programs like Quicken. Unfortunately, while the site serves its purpose well, it is currently unable to actually transfer any funds to pay bills - you’ll have to go to your bank’s website to do that.
As part of the update, Mint is also releasing a handful of new guides to personal finance, ranging from “reducing credit card debt” to the seemingly obvious “saving money while dining out”.
Mint, which has now raised $17 million in venture capital, was the overall winner of the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.
The new designs are below. In the first image the old is on left, new is on right.
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Why do i still see the design of left image i.e. old one?
Any news on when there will be UK support?
I still see the old design too - but then I’m from the UK so maybe it’s a US rollout?
I see the old design as well. I’m in Geneva, Switzerland…
A redesign can be good or bad, for many reasons why a redesign might actually cause you to lose traffice, google it.
Anyway, I was interested in signing up and was trying to find out what type of account levels they have other than the “free” accounts, but after going through 10 pages or so I don’t see any of that information anywhere, what’s up with that? Their business model is not based on freemium? Or they simply has left that out and hopefullly the resdesign will address that.
Seriously, this is not the first freemium startup that I’ve seen not providing account levels comparision that is easily accessible or found.
Alfred
The reason you don’t see it is because they don’t have account levels. They make their money on referral fees for signing up for new credit cards, wireless services, brokerage accts, etc.
You really shouldn’t leap to conclusions.
The reason you see the OLD website cause, some VC probably paid techcrunch some playola to get this blogola. So people will actually USE mint.com.
Stupid domain, Decent Idea, done wrong, unless you are techcrunch and bet your reputation on it by voting it “Best of Means Nothing Show”
IMHO
Take off the 80% of bogus accounts, and I believe they manage like $2-5 billion.
Stats, Stats and Lies. How you look at things
You can say George Bush has done a good job as president. Then you would be a blind, deaf republican. ahhh….. named McCain
I thought school was back in session?
Don’t blow off your classes early, kid, you’ll be left behind.
Anthony, please use a service before commenting. IMO Mint rocks!
I actually use mint, it rocks. Minor bugs were around earlier, but it improves very quickly.
I used Quicken for a while and this is much easier and “free-er”.
Mint is interesting for a few reasons. The delays at startup were frustrating but they seem to be adding features and getting better all the time. And I have to say their support was excellent even when things weren’t going well. Any organization built on customer service principles in this day and age, has my respect.
The thing I find more interesting though is Michael’s fascination with Mint. Sure Jason wrote this article. wink wink. Hey Michael is that some mint on your chin or are you just happy to see me?
I could really use Mint’s service but so far its failed to connect to all my accounts, especially my credit union accounts. I tried several times during launch last year and again today. Too bad they are still working out connectivity issues. I imagine this is not easy, but since its a fundamental requirement for their business, they need to address these things sooner than design changes.
By the way, I saw the old design too - the old and the new one both look good.
Ok, I tried again and they were just able to connect to one of my credit union accounts! Sweet - looks like its already gotten better.
It’s a challenging problem. The tension between showing content/graphics vs explaining what the site does and its many features. I like their new features list on the left and the corresponding testimonials from users on why the feature is useful.
it’s really beautifull this website.. great.
Mint.com is using Google Website Optimizer, a great way to do a/b split or multivariate testing to optimize performance - https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/exptlist?account=344798&hl=en.
If you can’t measure, you can’t make decisions in confidence.
I want to love Mint, but it just seem like a front for the credit industry as you navigate through the site.
I’m not saying that it is, but there seems to be an awful lot of offers for ways to manage debt — even for those who don’t need it.
There should be a way on Mint to stop displaying offers for credit cards. Some of us prefer not to be tempted into debt. And I think the American economy would be better off if we didn’t get bombarded with it everywhere they looked — including Mint.com.
Umm No redesign in South Florida.
This is a perfect example of balancing Business vs. Customer needs:
http://www.tripleconfluence.co.....customers/
A business can’t be successful without understanding its product’s impact on its customers. Blindly redesigning a product based only on customer feedback (and not considering the business impact) can only get you so far, or can even have a negative impact on your business. This is also a great way for Mint to get more “bang for its buck” by getting further reach for its existing marketing campaigns.
No redesign from Atlanta, GA.
With change there will always be doubts. I will agree to a point that major changes to how a site looks or functions may cause traffic to drop off. However, in the long run traffic will pick up… unless the changes make the experience on the site overly negative. In most cases everything is for the better. People just don’t like change.
I was very happy with Mint until I decided to switch banks. I’d been screwed by Wells Fargo one too many times and took all my funds to a competitor then closed my account.
It turns out that Mint does not support this scenario! My Wells Fargo account was closed, and so their account tracking scraper couldn’t connect to it. Therefore Mint thought all my money was still in there. There is no way to make a manual adjustment to an account. So my overall asset balance was about 2x what it should have been, and Mint kept complaining that it couldn’t connect to one of my accounts (duh).
You can delete an account from Mint, but guess what? This will delete all PAST transaction information for that account too. Yep. I talked to support and they had nothing for me. Very disappointing. Mint is now useless to me.
This is an edge case, to be sure, but if they ever want to grow beyond a few hundred thousand users and *gasp* charge for their service, they’re going to have a lot of edge cases to satisfy. Some kind of manual adjustment feature that lets you update your accounts yourself seems like a damn good idea, and broadly applicable to a lot of cases.
So long, Mint.
Hi scarabic, sorry to hear about your bad experience. Although it’s true that you can’t make a manual adjustment to an account, we definitely handle your situation.
Just go to the accounts page and edit your account. You can mark it as “closed” and then it will show a balance of $0 while maintaining all your transaction history.
Jason Yiin
Software Engineer @ Mint
Thanks Jason but that’s not working. I see that you can do that for accounts that are still valid and can be found by Mint. But once Mint fails to connect to an account (in my case because it’s closed - no longer there) Mint defaults to a message reading:
“We could not find your account.
Learn more about this error?
Cancel | Okay”
The “edit” button is gone. So perhaps it’s just a UI oversight. How about re-enabling “edit” for accounts that can’t be connected to?
That is to say… you CAN close the account on Mint as long as it’s still OPEN. But once it’s CLOSED at your financial institution, you have little choice but to keep it OPEN at Mint
I agree with scarabic. Same scenario, different bank involved. Mint is a great service, but they really need a manual transaction option. Other than that minor (but important) issue, I have been a very happy user of Mint for a year now. I track bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts and my mortgage. It just plain works.
If I see the word save any more on their site, I think I might have a seizure.
Nothing screams “suspect” more than that. Choose your target market carefully, else you may end up with a bunch of complainers.
Wow, talk about a coincidence. I just started using Mint yesterday and so far I’m impressed. Still has some issues to work through, but looking good overall.
I’m still shocked that Mint won the TC40 award last year. It’s just a reskinned version of Yodlee, with some additional helper logic to find you a better credit card rate. Literally. And frankly, it tries too hard: It frequently (read: all the fucking time) tries to repurpose or reassign transactions based on some text-matching algorithm that invariably gets things INCREDIBLY wrong.
It doesn’t just rely on the transaction category according to the vendor, but will look at the words and try to match them to another vendor based on their body of other vendors in their system, usually to absolutely deplorable result. Yodlee never tries this and is simply much smarter about a lot of this.
Yodlee isn’t as attractive and misses some of the more impressive flourishes, but it doesn’t fail so much. And frankly, awarding a company whose entire product was reskinning another company’s technology (even if it was properly licensed, etc.) and adding one or two additional features, is far from innovative enough to have warranted a win in the TC40.
Ridiculous AND useless, to boot!
most likely they are spot-testing new designs with a % of audience (similar to practice Google & many others also use). good to see them making progress on this front; altho i think the service is already quite useful / usable, probably quite a bit more opportunity to grow & expand on existing audience by doing this type of testing.
personally i think most startups overlook basic testing & rapid iteration as simple techniques to improve conversion around customer acquisition, user engagement, retention & monetization. [plug warning] in fact i’m running a conference called Startonomics to help other startups with similar issues & topics re: product development & online marketing.
[disclosure: in addition to shamelessly plugging my own conference, i'm also an investor/advisor in Mint, and did some early work with the company about a year ago. my comments are obviously biased, but still quite impressed with what they've accomplished to date]
Update from Mint: roll out of the new design will happen this afternoon. Thanks to everyone here who has already come to the site to check it out.
So why exactly do I want to trust all my personal financial information to a dinky start-up that is burning through $17 million in VC money???
This company has no hope of going public. It will be sold to some finanical institution that will use the data they’ve collected to try to sell you more stuff.
You “early adopters” are pretty trusting (or totally foolish).
I don’t know why all of you praise this new design. The old one is quite good. And honestly the new one is not that impressive.
Anyway, it is a good PR stunt but it has nothing to do with conversion rates.
Anybody who is stupid enough to give Mint their username and password shouldn’t be complaining when their bank account is drained. We have stupid people who just go to some web 2.0 startup and input their username and password to their bank and expecting that their money will be safe. Good f*****, people are idiots, it is unbelievable.
And even worse, this company already told you the service is free and they will spam the living daylight out of you. Wait till Mint gets desperate. Mint users will complain like a mofo. It is your fault to trust Mint with your bank’s username and password.
No redesign from Murfreesboro, TN, USA.
The new design has just gone live, you heard it here first. Thanks all for your enthusiasm. Feel free to give me any feedback.
Jason M. Putorti
Lead Designer, mint.com
I hope that the people making pish-posh comments about how stupid you have to be to give your bank info to a website have never bought anything online or written anyone in meatspace a paper check. I hope you have never used etrade or paypal, and that you have a team of lawyers monitoring everyone who’s ever swiped your debit card. Once you take into account how exposed you already are, factor in standard protections offered against fraud (including not only your bank’s features but - uh, the law), and try to think through a scenario whereby Mint could realistically vaccuum away several hundred thousand people’s savings and escape scot-free… at that point the naysaying is what starts to sound pretty stupid. If you’re actually worried about Mint running off with your nest-egg, I guess you should start worrying that every cashier you’ve ever handed a paper check to has all the info needed to rob you blind of every red cent.
Nice redesign, but it looked fine before. No redress for my issue, above. Boo
‘If you’re actually worried about Mint running off with your nest-egg, I guess you should start worrying that every cashier you’ve ever handed a paper check..’
Actually the more serious concern is that their system will be breached by some hacker in Russia. There is certainly plenty of incentve to do so with so much personal information accessible per account.
btw, who the hell writes cheks to cashiers anymore…
I agree with you in spirit: I almost never write checks anymore. But my point there is that fraud has been around a long time and these aren’t new problems. People react to Mint like it’ll overturn their nicely locked-up life, but I suspect in most cases we’ve all got a fair amount of exposure out there already.
btw, the redesign is just a bit to ‘fluffy’ for my taste and borders on vomit-inducing..sorry.
Speaking to the new design… very well done. Conversion rates are most definitely going to jump. Access points have great contrast (the orange sign up buttons jump off of the page)… clean, welcoming, accessible, fresh and professional aesthetic… Making a lot of information quickly and intuitively digestible… speaks to every potential use-case scenario. Looking forward to seeing their well deserved ROI for some some stellar design work.
well, myself, for one, found the new design to be more helpful in getting to the guts of it all and start the budget-y stuff. it’s a good thing too - not a moment too soon. take a look at why i came back and my experience, here: http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2.....ng-for-me/
No redesign as of yet in Big Rapids, MI.
This is a great bit of advice for startups. Jason, thanks for highlighting it. I am definitely recommending it as part of my Weekend Reading…
http://tpgblog.com/2008/08/08/.....st-8-2008/
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com
Yeah, still no redesign here in Williamsburg, VA. How about dealing with the glitchy stuff that happens first though.
I have a lot of problems associated with splitting transactions?
Or how about figuring out why transaction are randomly re-categorized and renamed. random
Or maybe figuring out why that the transactions that payed off my credit card are transferring but there still being a small balance left in Mint.com that is not actually there.
The Mint website is good. They’ve made some judicious choices, the blog has some good articles.
The website will work because people need financial advice and if you don’t have such a large amount to save this will do.
Oh man winning customers is such a hard business at least they’re trying : Hats off !