Better Banking (2.0)

Ammunition's work for Wells Fargo ATMs

I have talked about banking before, and talked about bank related online interfaces, and I think in both cases I have expressed a number of negative emotions. Either way, I was looking over an interesting little design company's website and I came across this image thinking it was their work for a bank website. I realised it was actually for an ATM and became saddened because for a brief moment I thought someone might have actually had some good ideas about web banking. As a reaction I thought perhaps this was a seed for a development process.

So far I like the ideals of simplicity and clarity and I think that online things are perceived as fast and that it is an important aspect of the whole issue of modern banking. More than this however I think data is one of the most relevant things when sitting at a computer so I think providing a lot of really useful data visualisations would be great. Lastly, money needs to have tight security however there are some imaginable instances when some of the more social aspects of the web could come to play. Not sure how yet. We will see.

More to come I hope. Comments and suggestions are encouraged.

Budgeting

So I have been using mint for a few months now and more recently I have been spending a fair bit of time planning and budgeting my upcoming trip. During this process I have experimented with a hole bunch of information models and approaches to money. Not really thinking about breakdowns and contingencies but just trying to work out really effective ways to visualise the data at hand and also ways to work with it. Part of this has included considering sources of data and how the data will be used at different times during this process. 

A scenario of what I am thinking about is as follows. 

A person planning a trip around the world must consider a number of things; travel costs, passports and visas, projected income, projected living costs in each location, and accommodation. They can map these things out pretty easily before they start actually making reservations and so forth so they can just get a rough idea about weather or not it will work with the money they have. This is not hard, essentially writing documenting dates of events, like the start of a trip and so on, and costs of things that can be estimated or referenced online. As a side note, I really think travel sites should give an estimated cost per day living, at perhaps 3 different tiers of luxury. That would help so much. 

After getting an estimate cost model and realising whether or not the trip is even remotely viable they need to start actually buying tickets and so on. At this point I think the common visualisation methods, such as daily balance spreadsheets, begin to fail because they do not let the user really represent the information the do and do not know in a realistic manner. I may be very sure that I need to leave a specific country by a certain date, or meet a friend somewhere at some time but for the most part I think there are just too many variables to construct a good model in this way. This really is quite a wicked problem, too much potential to change. 

I guess what I am really getting at is that there is a gap between having an idea of what should happen and making it happen in naive budgeting methods because they do not seem to accommodate indecision well.

I also think as one lives the process of spending money the budgeting model should be a tool that can continue to provide feedback and help with contingency processes. 

So the end product I think should exist is some kind of thing where costs have various statuses of certainty, as do most other details, like dates. This should also be applied to income as so many people work on hourly wages. This would basically let the user forecast a cost or profit and as time comes close establish greater detail, then as the expenditure occurs it can be represented within the system in absolute detail. I think beyond that the role of such a product is just to provide a hole lot of really useful ways of looking at the data at hand. I really think people miss a lot of info about their money information because they do not look at the data properly. This is something a good money product should help with.

Oh gosh what a scrambled set of thoughts. Luckily I can blame my concussion for this post. 

In other news, I obviously lived through the night re. yesterday's post on my Concussion. 

In other other stuff, why on earth do more spell checkers not use Google's spell checking technology. Apple's sucks so much in comparison to Google's. 

Projecting Costs for Mint

I think it would be really great if Mint let you project costs for things as this would essentially let you make a full budget. I also think there should be a little more in the way of consolidation and a manual input so you can input expenditure that has not appeared independently. One feature of forecasting would be that Mint could automatically consolidate actual earnings with expected earnings, when your bank sends the info out. 

All in all I think Mint now does something that is not that useful in a way that is not that great. It is a good idea as a product but I think it needs a bit more energy and a more features to really push in this market.