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Why Wesabe lost to Mint? The experience
Well worth a read is Why Wesabe Lost to Mint, a clear-eyed review of why one Web 2.0 financial site shut down, and a competitor went on to fabulous success, being bought by Intuit for over $100 million.
The review is written by Wesabe's co-founder, who concludes the following (emphasis mine):
Between the worse data aggregation method and the much higher amount of work Wesabe made you do, it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly.
It's impressive for an entrepreneur to make public such an honest review of his mistakes. And he makes a strong case for why he made the decisions he made along the way.
Still, the question remains: what will you do - today, tomorrow, the next day - as you face decisions in your work? Will you decide in favor of a good experience? Or will other goals and constituencies dilute that focus?
Once again, Wesabe co-founder Marc Hedlund has some wise words. Here's how to win, he says.
Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you'll win.
The fate of Wesabe provides an important cautionary tale. Never let a competitor focus more on experience than you do!
I loved that article, too, but I think you emphasized the wrong words. It's the "far more quickly" part that was Marc Hedlund's real insight, I think.
I guess your point is that companies ought to care about user experience as a competitive differentiator in a general sense (as opposed to not caring about it at all), but for those of us who already do care, Hedlund's specific insight that a short-term pleasant experience might have more customer impact than your product's long-term value is extremely interesting.
Christopher - agreed on all. First hurdle is to get companies to care about the experience at ALL - most don't yet. For those that clear the first hurdle, next hurdle is to understand when and how to focus on different moments or aspects of the experience. First impressions mean a lot, as does an early, initial "win." Good games - see http://goodexperience.com/games ! - provide many examples of how this is done to get brand new users moving onto the adoption curve. Once the initial phase is over, it's on to long-term value and the long game of experience.
Is Good Experience also disclosure and recovery from poor experience. It will be interesting to watch Mint and its users over the next few days. The user comments seem to indicate a genuine mis-step.
[quoting below]
From the MINT Team.
Why did you receive blank emails from Mint.com late Tuesday night?
Edited on 10/13/10
We apologize for the frustration and alarm this may have caused. On Tuesday night October 12 PDT, a flood of emails were sent from stage-mini@mint.com to some Mint users. It was a misconfiguration from a test system (with no customer data) causing blank emails to go out. There is no security concern with the emails and we apologize for the alarm it may have caused you. We also apologize if we woke you up from your sleep!
We're putting measures in place so this never happens again. From all of us at Mint.com, sorry for being annoying and thanks for using Mint.com.
Sincerely,
Stephen and the rest of the Mint Team
Also of note: - while UX is crucial, when dealing with sensitive information, no amount of good or even great user experience will aid you if your service is insecure. From Hedlund's article I gather Wesabe was focusing on the technical aspects of a secure and reliable system, to the point of not being able to direct sufficient attention to the user experience.
If I'm right, that means Mint basically bought outright a service Wesabe tried to build from scratch - and thus were able to divert more attention to the user experience (as new companies rarely have infinite resources to throw at things).
The argument here being that Wesabe's choice turned out wrong because a competitor showed up with a better game - but had Mint not turned up, or if their use of Yodlee turns out to be insecure or unreliable, then Wasabe's choice will be proven right (probably to quite a limited degree of satisfaction to Hedlund et al, though, since they'll still be out of business).
Actually (and still, providing my "analysis" is correct) this makes a good case that, while extremely important, UX isn't the whole story, and that all you can really be expected to do is your best.
- and then hope nobody does the same thing better.
- and also be lucky.
- or hope to get real big real fast and pull a Microsoft on everybody (but I guess that's a different article)...