Online, poor designs are ignored and only great design bubbles to the surface. While some folks would no doubt be concerned about the security of any web-based financial planning tool, clearly Mint had no trouble attracting customers who felt that the reward outweighed any potential risk. The assumption is that things in the digital world are no more or less secure than those pieces of information floating around on pieces of paper or in file cabinets. Second, many people are increasingly comfortable sharing all kinds of data for the sake of convenience. Every competitive product needs to be at people’s fingertips, on the phone, on the web, everywhere. Increasingly, customers expect everything - in the immortal words of Robert Wodruff, the man who made fizzy sugar water into Coke - to be “within an arm’s length of desire”. In addition, took advantage of a couple very important trends that all firms should be watching: We have simplified decision-making processes with a number of clients - not just the choice model but the total experience - and seen immediate, material increases in revenue because we made the choice process more facile. Instead, it causes the customer to feel overwhelmed and walk away.
We know from our work in Behavioral Economics that too much clutter and too many choices can freeze customer decision-making. Even Scott Cook, the legendary CEO of Intuit, could not pull it off and the odd are good that your firm has this problem, too. As John’s friend Jim Rogers noted, “Organizations are like households - they tend to fill the attic and basement with too much stuff, and it takes discipline to remove it.”įrom a human standpoint, it is easier for executives to say “yes” to a new product or feature than to say “no.” It takes even more work to kill an existing service or offering. It is the natural tendency of all firms, product lines, governments and even households to build up too much complexity - complexity that adds little value. Why did the company that made its mark with a simple user interface (the very name “Intuit” is a riff on “intuitive”) have to buy Mint? Why couldn’t they have built it themselves? We’ve been pondering that question, and we think it’s because it is very hard for a complex organization to build something simple. According to the New York Times, they have tracked over $200,000,000,000 in spending and have 1.5 million users, meaning that Intuit is paying over $100 per user. Mint is a web- and phone-based tool with a simple design interface that helps people manage their finances in an integrated way - across all their credit cards and asset accounts.
This post was co-authored with Paul D’Alessandro.
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