Technology giveth

…and technology taketh away. I know this isn’t a personal finance blog, but this is an intersection of personal finance and interaction design that is driving me crazy. So apologies for what is probably just a really long and boring rant. Maybe it’ll be better if I add more pics.

Part of my application portfolio for the VCD program in the early days. Me dancing.

College

When I moved to Seattle in 2003 I opened up a US Bank checking account because it was free and on campus. And that was all fine and good while I was in school. I just kept everything in there and didn’t really think about it much at all. It’s just a place to hold cash and at least they didn’t charge me any fees for anything.

The Start

After graduating in 2007 I was still sort of in that weird limbo zone of transitioning into the working world and not really sure what I was doing. But in 2008 I started to pay more attention to where my very meager paycheck was going and started trying to actively save up.

So I signed up for Mint to keep track of everything and fell in love it. It made me a lot more aware of what I was wasting money on and generated very pretty graphs for me with very little effort on my part. And it also made me realize that there are lots of other banks & credit cards out there that pay you just for using them. And way more than the trivial .01% from US Bank.

I thought the big name online savings accounts were the only way to go. But I still wanted a bank that I could access locally so I went with Wamu who seemed to offer the best of both worlds: online savings account rates and local branches. And one of the nicest online banking sites I’ve seen. Of course this was just before they tanked and got sold to Chase. And since then they’ve become more like a regular bank with regular lame ass rates. And so at this point I have my cash across 2 big banks who aren’t really doing anything for me.

What’s a Credit Union?

I’ve always seen these credit union things all over the place but never really understood what they were for or why you would want to belong to one. Then we started doing an spot for a local credit union at work, so I started looking them up. Most people probably know this already but I recently learned:

1. At a bank, my money is just making more money for the CEOs and stockholders. Their main concern is profit for the company, which is why they pay their customers so little interest while charging higher rates for loans. They don’t give a shit about me.

2. Credit unions are owned and controlled by the members. The profit that comes from a CU comes right back to the community in the form of much higher yields and lower rates. They actually care about me because we’re all in it together.

My bank is sick.

Bye Bye Banks.

After some researching I start to wonder, why the hell you would ever want to belong to a bank?? Especially when CUs have so many high yeld checking accounts. I signed up with Verity Credit Union because they have an amazing checking account and there’s a branch within walking distance of my house. So I figure I’ll be able to ditch the banks, consolidate everything into this one account, and be good to go. What’s the catch? You have to use their debit card at least 12 times a month. Kind of annoying but not unreasonable. So I signed up.

And then I find out Mint doesn’t support them! (yet)

This frustrates me way more than it probably should. Angelo is probably tired of hearing me bitch abou it. But I am SO in love with Mint. I like my pretty graphs that help keep me in check. I like not having to work to get a quick overview. It’s been so helpful that the thought of not having it is like crippling. And the fact that VCU currently has the fugliest and least user friendly online banking system I’ve ever seen doesn’t help. (But supposedly they are launching a fully redesigned system in March so I’ll give them some slack for that)

I guess it’s mostly the fact that I have so few alternatives for a well designed PF tool that I almost don’t want to switch over that drives me crazy. Nothing comes anywhere close to my good old mint. I wish all financial institutions looked like mint.

Comparisons (with screenshots!)

Mint has plenty of white space. Clearly defined hierarchies. Clear information visualization that makes things as boring as bugets interesting to look at. The information you see is only what is useful and filterable. It is clearly focused on just serving the user before trying to rack in ad revenue. It’s just freakin awesome. Except that it doesn’t support VCU.

Wesabe is supposedly a big runner up for some people. But I have no idea why. All the little people icons at the top are distracting and banner ad like. The left side looks like google ads even though they’re not. The typography is clumsy and not organized clearly. And the entire process of importing data is both sketchy and a pain in the ass. Oh, and you have to individually tag all your transactions yourself. Fuck that. But of course they support VCU.

Geezeo is supposedly geared towards the college aged, so I had hopes that it might be okay. Unfortunately it looks like being youth focused to them means looking like freakin Myspace. Everything is so craped. The only part that is useful information is that tiny square in the middle. It’s pretty obvious the ads are the most important thing on this page, not me. There also is no real useful visualization of my data. But of course they support VCU. Although it seems they have trouble with hooking up to US Bank, which seems weird.

Thrive actually seems to be pretty promising. It looks like it was actually designed by someone. And it looks like the visualizations are pretty nice. Unfortunatley it doesn’t support VCU either so they’re useless to me now too. Actually, I couldn’t get it synched to anything. So it sort of completely fails on the functionality side of things. Which is unfortunate cause I probably could have lived with using this one if it worked.

Quicken Online I can’t get screenshots for because I can’t seem to log back into it even though I know my creds are right (I can log into other areas of Quicken) which is a big fail on their part. But from what I saw when I logged in initially Update: I did finally get back in so here’s some screenshots to be fair. it’s pretty clear they were late into the online PF tool game and trying to copy Mint without doing a very good job at it. It’s like when Microsoft tries to be cool and Apple-ify their stuff, but fails because they just don’t get it. Or they have 2 different teams not working together on it. It also was importing my data weird so the graphs were all wrong. And the graphs themselves looked like they were designed in Word. It also doesn’t include any investment or loan tracking.

So now what?

Now I’m thuroughly frustrated at how difficult it is to do something that should be incredibly easy. The ones that look nice don’t play nice with VCU. The ones that play nice with VCU are pretty much useless to me from a usability standpoint.

If I love Mint so much why don’t I just stay with my current banks so I can keep using it? By staying with the big banks that don’t care about me they might toss me like 8 bucks or something a month in interest (since my accounts are split across). Whereas consolidating I don’t have to support the big banks and I can get an extra 50 bucks a month. Doesn’t seem like a lot but it adds up after a while. Mint helped me realize that.

So despite all my design instincts I’m still going to move most everything over to VCU because it seems stupid not to. I’ll just hope that Mint will start supporting more credit unions soon. Or at least hope that the new VCU online banking interface launching in March will be useful enough to not need an external PF tool. Or at least not so damn fugly.

Looking ahead

It makes me feel like I should be doing more work in in the UI world. There is really be no reason why people should have to put up with poor design, especially when redesigning would make their life so much easier.

“if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone will discover it.” Paul Graham

It also occured to me that I’m not particularly interested in web/interaction design that pertains to selling you crap. I don’t want to work on flash banner ads for Nike shoes. Or make micro sites to sell Sidekicks. That stuff is all flashy and sexy and pays the bills, but I really feel like it’s not really the best use of good designers. I feel like I’ve been helping people sell useless stuff for a pretty long time when there are plenty of other areas that could use a lot more help. I’d really rather be working on something that makes it easier for people to do things and not worry about all the details.