Mint.com
When I found out about the topic of this week’s blog I started to pick my brain as to what in the world I was going to be able to write about concerning Mint and emotions. So I finally went ahead and visited the site again to make sure I didn’t miss out on anything. I realized when I did visit the website that I had overlooked things in the past that definitely are targeted towards the emotions of the user.
To begin I will give my personal emotional account. When I first went to site after receiving the topic of this week’s blog I, of course, was looking for ways the site tries to express or affect the user’s emotions. The first thing that came to mind was the fact that the entire site is based around the color green. In doing this, you can tell that the designers are purposely using the color of money surplus to entice users to user their site. This gives a positive emotion to the users that is very subtle but works very well. As I reflect back to my first time visiting the site, I remember that the color did entice me to join the site and help me get my finances organized and balanced out.
Once you actually make it into the site (logging in), you find that there is absolutely nothing on any of the pages that gives you a negative or foreboding feeling about your money. If you are in debt, the site gives you positive information to help you out. If you have credit cards that the site looks at and finds better alternatives than you will be notified about the possible money-savers. And lastly, if you are in the green the site goes out of its way to congratulate you and keep you coming back by shows you the nice complete bar charts and transaction list that keep you organized.
Secondly, I observed a friend use and interact with the site. Afterwards, I asked her a couple of questions about her emotional engagement with the website. She started off by viewing the site and going to login (she signed up to the site a couple of weeks ago). After logging into her personal site, she viewed her alerts and her face continued to be the same. There wasn’t very much visual emotion that I could see, apart from the various eye movements to different parts of the screen. There was a negative reaction in the middle of her viewing the site as well. She said that she didn’t like all of the email alerts she was getting from the site, after viewing the alerts area on the actual website.
After the visit to the site I proceeded to ask her a couple of questions. She seemed to react negatively to the red bar that accounted for debt. Even though it was the only splash of red on the screen, she said, “I don’t like all of the red.” I also asked her what sort of things motivated her to either stay on the site, or keep coming back to it. She said that she liked the way the site laid out the debts and assets, she also said that she didn’t seem to get on it as much because of the way it was organized.
From her response to Mint, I could tell that she wanted to use the site but felt restrained because she didn’t know how to go about getting organized. She felt that if she could get everything the way she wanted to then she would log on to the site more regularly.
