Best Practices - Mint

Mint is the #1 personal finance web application which was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million. It is defined as a web-based service that takes your information from banks, brokerages and credit-card companies and collates it into a single ledger. Mint is powerful enough to handle all but the most complicated of portfolios yet intuitive and flexible enough to make home-accounting chores kind of fun. Mint best practices excelled in all aspects whether it was identifying market opportunities, understanding customer needs and translating into outstanding product, and launch and market successfully. After being an active Mint user for more than a year, talking with Mint employees, and researching a lot about the company, I believe Mint’s success in overpowering a $10B competitor lays in its ability to take what used to be complex, boring, but yet important activities into intuitive, fun, and easy.

Mint succeeded where others failed and that is in Making It Simple. Their award winning user interface was a very simple one – starting from a relatively clean homepage which only showed the most important facts about an individual’s financial state. It was meant for everyone to understand and make use of, and not only for the financial wiz. Mint’s sign-up and initialization screen was very easy as well. While Quicken (the biggest competitor and incumbent application) required 50 screens to get started, Mint required two.

Mint’s focus on understanding customer and translating to successful product was triggered by the incumbent financial products which were very traditional and non-innovative using old and tiresome web interface. To create a clean design and easy-to-use interface, Mint's hired an Apple.com designer to leverage Apple’s best practices in design and building user facing applications. One example of the design was a long, orange oval that says "Free! Get started here“ which turned out to be one of the most recognizable parts of the front page. Mint claims it has an 18% conversion rate. Mint’s design is user-centric which is generally extremely important in consumer products, and especially in financial applications. It is said that a good design helps convince new users to feel safe about entering sensitive information (such as bank usernames and passwords). According to Mint’s CEO, "Design is crucial to conveying trust which is not conveyed through copy or the words that you use, it's conveyed in an instant through the quality of your design."

To conclude, I believe Mint’s product best practices can be summarized to:

· Frictionless – making the product easy to initialize and use through great UI

· Instant Satisfaction – providing instantaneous insights and value immediately after first encounter (Already in the first time Mint shows a simple analysis of your expenses and financial statement)

· First to simplify a big problem – Mint was the first to make a complex and difficult matter into an intuitive and fun one.