Thursday 8/21/2008
Business, Design, Writing

You loyal few RSS subscribers know that I’ve failed to post for quite a while. (I have no visitors.) Since taking my job at Belkin I’ve been struggling a bit for time and against the urge to post things that might be too Belkin-specific. So I’m toying with a few overlapping ideas; I want to know what you think of them.

1. Make posting easier. Take advantage of microblogging techniques and mobile software to make quick posts possible from anywhere.
2. Make my “read-later” list public. Things I find interesting enough to mark for later perusal might be of interest to others. Tagging might be useful in this data set.
3. Do some sprints. Choose a topic and make short daily posts about that topic for a specified period of time, maybe 30 days or 90 days. Possibilities include “Today’s UX winner and loser,” “Would be better if…,” “GenX grows up,” etc. These topics could have different visual designs, although I’ve done a lot of visual design wheel-spinning in the past.
4. Open up the topics. Hinted at above. It doesn’t have to be 100% design or user experience.
5. Loosen the filter. Even half-formed thoughts are fair game, if reasonably presented in an effort to engage.

My goal is to reinvigorate my blog by allowing shorter posts and a broader range of posts. My wish is that this will foster discussion, get some things out of my head where I can refer to them later, and help me be a better observer of my surroundings and influences. What do you think? Does this seem like a good approach? Any tips or ideas?

3 comments

Thursday 2/7/2008
I Like This

Gianni Botsford Architects : 092 : Casa Kike . Excellent continuation of the cross-bracing into the built-in shelves. Pretty and graphic.

3 comments

Thursday 2/7/2008
I Like This

Exploratory Design — Homage to the Stamp

No comments

Saturday 1/12/2008
Design

Progress

I’ve recently spent some time using Wesabe , during which one Andre Arko implemented one of my wishes (“archive” an account), and mentioned that he’d be working on the transaction view in the near future. Excellent. Transaction view is where I spend the most time in Wesabe, having not yet dug in to the social components. Here’s a picture of the core of transaction view:

What are you looking at?

At first glance, transaction view seems pretty straightforward, but there’s a lot of power hidden there. And “hidden” is part of the difficulty. For example, there’s no outward sign in the above image that I’m looking at the “unedited” view of this account, a filter which shows only transactions whose payee names have not been edited to be more human-readable. Right away we need some differentiation in the links at the top right that control filtering. And if I am looking at a filtered view of the account, which ostensibly would not show all of the transactions, a running balance is unnecessary. Removing it would also help distinguish the filtered views from the “all” view. Perhaps like so:

There are more polished ways to achieve this effect, of course.

It isn’t apparent from the images above that they use some ajaxy goodness to update the individual transactions, but fail to update the filtered transaction count that appears in the upper right. I didn’t realize this until I absently clicked on “untagged (15)” in another account and was told that there weren’t any untagged transactions. That mistake shouldn’t be so easy for the user to make; it is completely preventable.

The banks aren’t helping

The merchants and banks are making life tough for Wesabe users. In some cases the payee name as it appears fresh from the bank is cryptic; in others the name is merely an address or even less informative. You don’t have much to go on if you are trying to apply meaningful names to these merchants. There may be an opportunity here to reorganize data a bit to make it easier for the user to figure out who the merchant is, though. I started finding merchant names by Googling addresses, but found that if I scrolled down and found the same address, the amounts and dates (if they were recent enough) were useful clues. Perhaps merchants could have their transactions grouped? If I saw a merchant with a string of $7.35 transactions occurring every few days, I’d recognize my post-workout meals at Baja Fresh and be able to act accordingly. Here’s an example:

Granted, I couldn’t tell from these (oldish) transactions that the merchant was Target; I had to go to my records for that info. But as Wesabe gets more users, and as more merchant names are edited, the likelihood that Wesabe will have seen a particular merchant name before will rise. Wesabe could suggest the most popular option, and make it available as a nearby link. There’s no need to say “Originally: 9100020206 North…” right below a text field saying the same thing (which currently happens on every unedited transaction).

I took some other liberties with this grouped transaction:

• There’s no need to repeat $ on every dollar amount (but it is nice to have on totals or current balances), nor is there much call for a negative on every debit. Distinguishing the (far less frequent) deposits should be sufficient.
• I re-explained “Tags that stick every time” by naming the field and changing its alignment. Suggestions based on the suggested merchant name immediately follow.
• Since the primary goal of this altered view is to name the merchant, I did away with the transaction-level tagging.

I’m not completely sure that this is the right way to group transactions, but it is definitely worth studying.

You got your social in my financial

Edited and tagged transactions pick up some social flavor in the Wesabe interface. Here’s a sample of the current “all transactions” view, with my little top-right change to make it obvious:

There’s a lot of repetition in this tight little display of transactions. We’re not seeing our transactions in a purely columnar ledger format, but dates are repeated as if we were. Tags and social content based on those tags obtrude on each other. A little reorganization is in order:

There are a thousand ways to go about this. I opted to group transactions by date, reduce the number of labels, treat Fan/User/Captive differently, and give social content its own flavor. (I also notice that I have a Starbucks payee and a Starbucks Coffee payee. A way to edit the list of payees, allowing consolidation, would be great.)

Could be great

As Wesabe gathers more data and more users, they’ll have even more opportunity to expand ease-of-use. But there are plenty of opportunities immediately apparent to keep them busy in the meantime. I am excited about using this product as it grows and changes.

One comment

Wednesday 1/9/2008
Business, Design

Trapped on Palm?

My Twitter question about money management alternatives for iPhone hasn’t exactly borne fruit, but there are buds on the tree. I’ve been a loyal but increasingly less-satisfied Palm user since the Palm III launched in 1998. All that is preventing me from ditching Palm OS and getting an iPhone is my personal finance workflow.

Maybe I’m a weirdo

I have enjoyed accounts that always balance, zero surprises, and an enhanced ability to understand and plan the movements of my money since I started using Ultrasoft Money and Microsoft Money together in mid-2000. I could (and can!) enter bank, ATM, credit card, even cash transactions into the Palm as they happen, syncing to Microsoft Money later. This works well enough that I tolerate a relatively cumbersome process to preserve this work flow even now that I am on a Mac at home. I open Missing Sync, turn off syncing, fire up Parallels, press the sync button on my cradle, then reverse the steps to sync my calendar, etc. Seven steps where one button press used to do.

Sure, there’s Quicken for Mac and Pocket Quicken, but everyone I know who has used Quicken on the Mac says that it is a festering pile, and each subsequent version is a higher pile with more festering than the previous. No thanks.

If only…

There are a number of up-and-coming personal finance packages for Mac, including Cha-Ching , Liquid Ledger (sold as packaged software at Apple stores), MoneyDance , iCash , Checkbook , and others. None of them support the entry of records on a mobile device.

This leaves a web-based solution. Names that get bandied about here include Mint , Wesabe , and the online banking offerings of Citi, Wells Fargo, WaMu, and Back of America. But none of these allows you to enter transactions as they happen.

Wesabe to the rescue…someday?

Actually, that isn’t strictly true. If you can find the "Create a Cash Account" button buried somewhere in Wesabe’s "upload" pages, you can create a cash account that will accept your input. That’s a start. This last bit of info was pointed out to me by Marc Hedlund, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Wesabe (@ wesabe on Twitter). Marc heard my call for an iPhone-capable money management option, and mentioned that "Wesabe does that." An enlightening email conversation ensued wherein he revealed:

• They plan to make it easier to find the cash account setup functionality.
• They are working on the capability to enter transactions against other accounts.
• Auto-upload of account information gleaned from your bank is about to get a lot better, with essentially automatic support even for accounts that don’t currently support auto-update. The timeline for this was "in about a month," and we were exchanging email on new year’s day, so mid-February is probably realistic.
• They are working on making the setup of their desktop uploaders even easier. The OS X uploader needs to be manually invoked or put in your list of login items, too high a hurdle for consumer-level goods.

This looks very promising. None of the above list has launched, of course, so it isn’t real. Yet. I made some additional suggestions and complaints:

• Offering a cash account by default, and having the capability to add transactions to other accounts on by default, would require no configuration by the user (they wouldn’t have to find the spot where you turn these features on) and would seem internally consistent.
• A way to suppress an account without losing its transactions from history would be worthwhile.
• The information hierarchy around transactions is a bit messy; social content (related to the tags you give merchants and individual transactions?) is mixed right in with data about the transaction, and needs a bit of separation, for example.

Yes, but what do I really need?

After reading my extended complaining (this is hard to find, this is odd, your homepage has no background color), Marc asked the critical question: "Other than upcoming transactions, are you missing anything in what we provide today, in order to drop what you’re using now?" Ah, good. I had to think about it a bit. What parts of Microsoft Money and Ultrasoft Money did I depend on, and what could I discard? This required some thought. My list:

• Reconciliation. With updates coming rapidly from the banks, etc., this is really just a way to answer questions like: What showed up that I didn’t know about? Did I enter something in the wrong account? Why is my balance not what I expect? Am I current as of this statement?
• Recurring transactions. I make heavy use of these in Money; they’re great for paychecks, subscriptions, rent, etc. With the caveat that if a payment requires my action (such as sending a check), I need a reminder, not an auto-entry.
• Offline capability (maybe).

Those are the must-haves. I have made use of, but can live without, the next tier of features:

• Splits. Paychecks especially go into a lot of different buckets (taxes, insurance, HCRA, some to savings, some to checking, etc.). I suppose I could fake that with little constellations of recurring transactions.
• Reminders for scheduled transactions.
• Loan accounts.
• 401(k), IRA, and other investment accounts.
• Debt reduction and other planning features. The math for debt reduction planning is so simple that this could be a bit of content rather than a tool. Allowing creation of recurring transactions/reminders from such a plan would be a great feature, if the recurring transaction interface is solid.

My bad

It turns out that they do splits with a clever modification to tags; you can add a dollar amount to a tag for a particular transaction. This is easier to use than the split interfaces in Money or Quicken. They have a demo video for this feature that shows it off nicely.

As this all wound down, I told Marc I would relate my ideas about transaction view. I had better get on that (in an upcoming post). Also, the unmentioned player here is Quicken Online and their recently-announced iPhone-capable mobile version. Watch this space.

2 comments

Thursday 1/3/2008
Writing

Congressman Xavier Becerra’s web site was recognized as best among the house membership by the Congressional Management Foundation. Heady stuff. Mr. Becerra is proud enough of this fact to trumpet it on his quarterly (print) newsletter, so I decided to have a look, navigated to said website, and fired off a message via the handy email form (which inexplicably required my nine-digit zip; five digits wasn’t enough).

The auto-response made the wrong impression.

Dear Jon,

I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with me. Know that my staff and I treat your communication as effective tools to monitor the thoughts, wishes and needs of the community.

Thank for your dedication. I look forward to further communication.

Sincerely,

XAVIER BECERRA
Member of Congress

There’s a lot wrong with that “know that my staff” sentence.

• “Know that my staff and I…” : This is pretty good, but the “know that” construction is deeply affected.
• ”..treat your communication as effective tools…” : You’ve a singular communication being treated as plural tools. Neat trick. Also, treating my communication as a tool is akin to pretending. Treating it as an effective tool underscores the pretending. “We pretend that your communication matters.”
• “…to monitor the thoughts, wishes and needs of the community.” : Ah, but my one communication doesn’t represent anyone but me. Others may agree, but this is one message.
• What is unsaid : I’ll read it. I’ll get back to you. My staffers aggregate these and give me a report. Something to expect.

The law is (supposed to be) an instrument of plain language, but even in the simplest of messages we see little of it. Mr. Becerra, how about saying simply:

Dear Jon,

Thank you for our message. My staff collects these messages and I read them all every week or so. I respond to some of them personally, but I cannot attend to every message individually.

I welcome your future comments.

Sincerely,

XAVIER BECERRA
Member of Congress

For more on this topic, see the good old The Importance of Being Frequestly Fractal at Metacool.

No comments