2008 User>Driven Hall of Fame and Shame
Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 05:14PM Well, it's past time for the annual User>Driven Hall of Fame and Shame, and to speed things up we're going to do it a little differently this year. In past years we've had a nomination phase and a voting phase. This year we will combine them into one step.
As in past years, the goal is to compile the top 10 usability triumphs and top ten usability gaffes of the year past as nominated by you. So please...
Take 10 seconds right now and think of the one thing (product, service, website, software, gadget, whatever) that really works for you, that's so elegant in its design and operation it must be the result of a good feedback loop between the product designers and its intended users. Write down your first thought and add it as a comment to this entry.
Then take 10 more seconds and think of the one thing (same list) that really irks you every time you have to use it because the product designer clearly did not take the time to think about how it would really be used or try it out on one real-life person before getting it to market. Write that down too and post your comment.
Even if your favorite product or service isn't new this past year, if you used it or became aware of it last year, put it down.
The difference this year is that you can either submit your own ideas or simply vote for something someone else has nominated in your comments on this entry. You can submit your thoughts on why you like a specific product or just write "+1 for [product name]." I'll compile all the combined nominations and votes and declare winners for both fame and shame after a couple of weeks of voting.
As last year, the first people to nominate the winners for both fame and shame will receive User>Driven t-shirts from Zazzle.
My Nomination for Fame: Mint.com
;)
Mint's budgeting features are compelling and easyI've been using Mint.com to keep track of my finances for several months now. It's a free service that allows you to centralize and synchronize all of your internet-accessible accounts - banks, investments, credit cards, mortgages, loans - and see where all of your money is going.
To set it up, you first enter all of your usernames and passwords for your online accounts, authorizing Mint to retrieve your transactions for the last 90 days. Then whenever you sign into Mint, your latest transactions are automatically retrieved and added. And though it takes a little training by you, Mint also automatically categorizes all of your transactions into groups such as housing, food and dining, medical care, etc. This enables you to track your expenses by category month-to-month and to easily establish and track budgets for specific types of expenses.
This is the sort of thing I used to do with Quicken. I was a early adopter of Quicken for electronic bill-paying but I got away from it when my bank developed a reasonable web interface for that function and Quicken seemed like extra work for not much benefit. (I never did like Quicken's categorization scheme or canned reports.) The extra effort here is much lower than I found with Quicken and there are several benefits I've discovered in a few months of use.
First, it is very useful to gain some perspective on where your money going. When I first started looking at how things were breaking out, I was actually relieved to see our largest categories were sensible things like housing, food, tuition and savings. And I was surprised to discover what a small portion of our overall budget went to utilities and auto expenses (despite high gas prices).
Mint also has a unique feature that allows you to compare your spending in a category with those of other users either nationally or by state or major city. So you can see if you are spending more or less than average on restaurants than others and gain more perspective that way. I spent more on restaurants and less on home improvement than the average Massachusetts Mint user this month. :( I like this comparison feature but I think I'd like the option also to see guidelines provided by financial experts on the percentage one should ideally spend on each major category.
Mint's iPhone app is very useful for tracking your spending throughout the month. I've set monthly budgets for things like groceries, restaurants, shopping and entertainment and I can see my up to date status against those budgets right on my iPhone any time. It even takes into account and graphically displays how far into the calendar month I am next to how far into the budget I am. This is really handy when trying to decide whether to make a purchase and I can't tell you how often budgeting systems get this bit wrong. Is the fact that I've used 80% of my budget for toys this month good or bad? Well, it depends on whether it's the 2nd or the 29th, doesn't it? With Mint, I can see where I am in my budget right at the moment of temptation and this can help to reign me in or help me feel less guilty, depending on what I see.
I remember describing a feature like this to a friend familiar with the credit card industry back in the late '80s. I said what I wanted was a read-out on my credit card that showed by category what my total spending had been this month. Because it centralizes all of my accounts and allows me to track totals across them, though, this is far more useful in practice than my original idea or my bank's iPhone app or any other app from a single institution.
;)
Mint's Overview page provides a nice glanceable summaryMint.com competes directly with a similar offering from Quicken called Quicken Online. I've been using QO longer, actually, than Mint. Despite their long experience in consumer finance applications, though, I find their offering inferior in many ways and I will probably drop it soon. QO's ability to synch with banks and so on to get transaction data is far less reliable and slower than Mint's. I find I routinely have to manually refresh many of my accounts multiple times and they have never been able to connect to my 401(k) provider. This is bizarre coming from the makers of the most established electronic bill payment provider.
QO's categorization scheme is also less useful than Mint's, providing only a flat list of categories instead of a hierarchical scheme. Mint also has tags that allow you to filter and find expenses related to taxes, vacations, reimbursable expenses or anything else you like. This is very handy if you travel for work and you want to see what your real expenses look like separate from that while still putting hotel expenses into the travel category. It's also handy to see just how much you spent in total on that last vacation or on holiday gifts.
One thing that neither service has right yet is bill reminders and cash-flow prediction. Both services are trying to meet the laudable goal of telling you how much money you really have and when it might run out, rather than just giving you a snapshot of your accounts at the moment. They try to do this by looking at past income and spending patterns and predicting when you may go into the red. This seems like a good idea but in practice I am seeing all sorts of reminders for bills that do not actually recur and dire warnings of negative balances in the future that will not actually happen. as a result, I am really ignoring this feature. Mint makes that easier than QO which plasters their summary page with large colorful predictions of impending doom that I can't configure away.
In summary, Mint.com provides me with a valuable, usable service that I use at least once a week and that beats its direct competition by providing similar features in ways that allow me to work the way I really want to rather than how the vendor thinks I might or should.
My Nomination for Shame: Microsoft Exchange Server
Lately I've been taking to saying "Outlook is no one's friend," and whenever I do I get knowing grimaces and groans from around the room. The truth is, though, that the troubles most people have with Outlook are really troubles with the Exchange Server software behind the scenes.
How often have you said or heard someone say, "Can you send me that invite again? It's fallen off my calendar." Or, "I can't reschedule the meeting. Outlook won't let me." Or, "Outlook is hung up again trying to get information from the server." Or, "I had to reboot again because Outlook was acting weird." These are daily utterances where I work and I hear it from colleagues at other companies too.
Exchange's vulnerabilities were brought home to users at my company this year when a single problematic iPhone trying unsuccessfully to sync to Exchange not only brought down the ActiveSync service but my company's entire email service for some time.
Outlook's well-known usability issues aside, it seems it's very hard to keep an Exchange Server healthy and all of its clients stable and in proper sync. I expect a lot more from one of the largest software companies on earth.
So those are my nominations. What are yours? Click comments below to speak out. Do it now or miss out on winning a User>Driven t-shirt. And if you like my nominations, you can vote for those. (If they get the most votes, the first voters for them win the t-shirts.)
Bruce McCarthy
UPDATE: I'll be closing nominations for the 2008 Hall of Fame and Shame at the end of next week (probably on Friday the 24th) so get your nominations for most loved and hated products in before then - or simply post a comment supporting someone else's nomination.
Let your opinion be known.
Reader Comments (11)
I love Mint.com, and especially the app.
Lately I've been enamored of Flickr. Their photo upload tool is dreamy.
The sites that irk me the most are usually the most critical -- financial services that post unreadable or otherwise incomprehensible information and options. Or they're just unusable, like the credit card center that logs you out after 30 seconds of inactivity.
I like the Flip MinoHD camcorder for Hall of Fame and the Blackberry Storm for Hall of Shame. The Flip's nicest features are the direct h.264 compression of HD which is pretty bloated without, and the small size that lets me keep it in my pocket at all times. The controls couldn't get any easier to use and the price is definitely right. The only reason I would get rid of it is if the new iPhone incorporates HD video and I could loose one more device. As for the Storm, I used it for 2 minutes before I realized it was a half-baked iPhone wannabe piece of crap. The touch and click was awkward at best and the integration points non-existent. They're going to have to do better than that or they're done this year.
There's one app that I used extensively last year: LastPass (http://www.lastpass.com). It's a secure, portable and always evolving password manager that will allow you to connect to your multiple accounts using strong passwords you do not have to remember from anywhere in the world. I use it all the time, it saves me tons of time and I feel that my passwords are finally secured. Check it out!
I nominate the netbook to the hall of fame this year. Netbooks aren't for everyone and it took me a while to warm up to the idea, but I've grown to love these small low-power devices that can handle the essentials (email, browser, office applications, media, VNC, etc). I bought an HP Mini with a 10" screen and I no longer need to bring my (clunky by comparison) work laptop home.
HP Minis look interesting. The problem with netbooks for me was always the price. If they cost a substantial fraction of the cost of a full-featured notebook then I couldn't justify them as a separate purchase. The XP mini starts at $329 - and the Linux version is $279!
I'm curious, though, what you use it for at home. If you don't want to carry your laptop, you don't already have another PC at home you could use?
For me it's a couple of things:
1. Size and weight: I really like having a computer that I can slip into any bag or carry around like a book. Somewhere between the size of a netbook and a laptop is a threshold where the laptop is just too big to lug around everywhere.
2. 95% of what I need at home doesn't need anything stronger than 1.6Ghz and 2 gigs of RAM.
3. I like the Atom processor. Very energy efficient.
4. Price: They may not be cheap enough, but netbooks are cheaper than laptops. And if you consider the price of a more powerful laptop in the same form factor of a netbook, then you start seeing a much larger price margin. The HP Mini probably isn't the best example of cost savings. I paid a little extra for styling.
At home I have a desktop in the home office (which is in our basement). I'll admit that my most common use of the Mini is on the couch in front of the TV, catching up on email or surfing the web.
I knew it! The number on reason I would be interested in a mini or similar netbook would be for surfing or email on a casual basis. I have wanted a cheap "web pad" since about 1997.
[First a disclosure: I work at Google.]
I want to nominate the Chrome browser for the hall of fame. I am supremely impressed with its speed, its user experience and how well it works across most sites.
I never thought I could quit firefox (my beloved extensions!!) but it is the true mark of a great product that I traded off something I used to value with something I love even more.
My honorable mention for a great app is to Livestation (http://www.livestation.com/) player. It does not have lots and lots of stations but it has all I use and like Chrome it is fast, the user experience is great.
My nomination for the hall of could be a lot better goes to Picassa Web. I love the software but I think the web version leaves so much to be desired. Flickr is just so much better.
-Avinash.
Best product I've used this past year -- the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I'd seen the ads yet didn't believe it actually worked. We just sold our house and used a bunch of them to really make the place shine -- I'm guessing we got an extra $5k just because of how it was able to clean our bathroom tub, remove scuff marks from floors and walls, and just clean up in general. It cleaned a few things on which everything else we tried failed.
Honorable mention goes to the iPhone Public Radio app, which lets me listen to my local public radio station when I travel just like I'm listening to my iPod. Very handy and a great use of the 3G network.
My hall of fame would go to www.assuredlabor.com , an online marketplace that connects urban professionals with affordable and trustworthy service providers in their area. It's a bit like an ebay for informal workers except it has an SMS application to serve workers in developing countries.
I think the hall of shame goes to adobe reader. I don't have the patience to explain how terrible this product is.
I totally agree on mint.com. Once I got all the bank accounts, credit cards, etc hooked up, I could finally see everything and have a clear view of what is going on with the spending side of the house. At first my wife hated it. She was concerned that big brother was watching her every move. While that is true :-), in the end, it really helped us to manage our expenses better.
For what it's worth, I had a terrible experience with a Dell netbook. I got one that was running linux, and the idea was that it would be something simple for my kids to play with. I suppose most of the blame should go back to me because linux is not a kid-friendly OS. The return process was a nightmare as well.