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This "Myth": Mint's design, while definitely very appealing and definitely a factor in getting people to trust the company, doesn't seem to me to be enough to e
by mikeryan 16y ago
This "Myth":
Mint's design, while definitely very appealing and definitely a factor in getting people to trust the company, doesn't seem to me to be enough to explain the different outcomes,
Is contradicted by this:
Second, Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could
UX design isn't just pretty pictures - which is why its now called "user experience" as opposed to "user interface" now.
I think a lot of people dismiss ux considerations because they think its just the part of the site thats "pretty" and its not.
- xentronium 16y agoI think he talked about aesthetics in the first case.
- mikeryan 16y agoYeah but I think its a mistake to try to distinguish between aesthetics and user experience when its being done as a single discipline.
- precipice 16y ago(This is Marc, the author of the linked post.) You're right, I both credited and dismissed a very large category with the word "design." In my view some people believe that it was just the visual appeal of Mint's site that did us in. In my view that helped them but not enough to kill us. I do think that we spent our usability effort (as I say in the post) in the wrong place, making editing, for instance, easy, instead of making editing totally optional.
- nanijoe 16y agoToo bad you did not have the funds to continue, I thought it was pretty a useful service.
- bmelton 16y agoYou're conflating design with UI and UX. I think the point was that being prettier alone wouldn't have won Mint the war, but being way more usable totally did. If you stripped the pretty colors, backgrounds and images from both products, the user experience for Mint is still miles better than Wesabe's was, and that is the difference.
- mikeryan 16y agoI'm actually (it looks poorly) trying to not conflate UI and UX. I'm trying to say that design is the entire experience both the UX and UI.
- bmelton 16y agoOh, in that case, I respectfully disagree. To me, the 'visual design' of a site is what it looks like in Photoshop, or Gimp, or what have you, before it is even necessarily sliced into even HTML bits. Once it is sliced into HTML, and the mouseovers, hover elements and all that jazz are added (or not, depending on your workflow), that's when I consider it a 'UI' instead of a 'design'. Before either of those happens, you need to have at least given consideration to your 'UX', which is a concept encompassing movement between functions, what goes where, how you move from page to page, what glows or fades when you hover / click / etc., and all that jazz. Perhaps I'm the idiot here, and I'm segregating the concepts unnecessarily, but I don't feel like I am, though I'm sure my explanation here is poor (sorry -- pressed for time).
- Aetius 16y agoYou're wrong. Design is the graphics and user experience taken together. Most companies still have a designer that designs both UI (graphic element style and placement) and UX (dictation of frontend behavior).
- mortenjorck 16y agoDesign makes a better verb than a noun.
- brandnewlow 16y agoI agree the design was a critical piece of Mint's victory. So how does a startup find a designer who's THAT good vs. just PRETTY good?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]