Personal Money Management Product Design
There are literally hundreds of books, software packages and tools designed to help you manage your money more effectively. Most of them don’t work very well for many people. They fail because they involve a lot of up front learning and setup, are often very hard to use, require constant updating, results can be complex or confusing and in general they don’t really provide the type of cognitive support we need to do personal money management.
One exception stands out and that is mint.com. The product is an outstanding example of cognitive design or designing for how our minds naturally work. Not only is set-up a snap, but you get an integrated view of your finances that is automatically updated, the ability to view and benchmark spending in many categories and specific advice (with $ amounts) on how to manage your money more effectively.
You can watch a video of how it works here. Or just try it out – it is free. They are adding some 3000 new users everyday.
Now all we need is something similar for managing personal health.
