J Patrick Hunt

I love Mint.com. I met Aaron Patzer at TechCrunch the year they won. I’m thrilled they got bought by Intuit in a huge exit.

But I hate that I had to delete an entire banking relationship for Mint to clear an account that I closed months ago. mint doesn’t allow me to close an account and it continued to show the balance of that account the day I closed it, seriously throwing off my cash balance and net worth calculations.

If you are an entrepreneur or want to be one, I highly recommend you watch this video. Terrific insight and real data from Aaron Patzer who founded Mint.com 3-4 years ago and recently sold it to Intuit for $170 million. I met Aaron at TechCrunch40 when they launched and won the grand prize, and he is as likable and humble as he comes across in this video. I’ve added this video to my personal collection of inspirational and informative videos that I keep on hand. I recommend you do as well.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

This is a really terrific post by Brandon Walkin on Managing UI Complexity. This is what usable is all about.

But Brandon works as a UI designer at Marketcircle. Billings has an amazing simple and intuitive UI. Daylite, not so much. I’ve tried several times to integrate Daylite into my daily life, to no avail because of design issues (its too complex). Hopefully, the work he hints at in this post will result in a much more usable and therefore useful Daylite.

Just a quick note to say that WordPress is perhaps the best software I’ve used in years, including Mac OS X, OS X Mobile (iPhone), and Gmail. Whether you use the hosted version at WordPress.com or the self-hosted version like I’m using here, WordPress is the fastest, easiest, and most flexible way to start publishing online. If you’re using anything else to publish blogs, small business websites, or other sites, you really owe it to yourself to try WordPress.

Newspapers have been around a long time. And despite their current economic troubles, newspapers have gotten more than a few things right throughout their history. One of those things is the creation and adherence to a strong information hierarchy for text elements on the page. Headlines, sub-heads, bylines, captions, body text, and other elements are consistently applied throughout a newspaper. But there’s more to it than that. (more…)

For many of you, this will seem like old hat. But I’m constantly amazed at how many websites don’t properly distinguish between form fields that are required and those that aren’t. Even if you have an incredibly simple signup form and ask only for required information, you need to put a note on the form that “All fields are required.” When some are required and others aren’t, clearly mark them appropriately (use asterisks by required fields with a note above that form saying what the asterisk means, include “required” next to required field labels, or include “optional” next to optional field labels, for example). Seriously, you’ll save your users a lot of headache by following these simple guidelines, and you’ll probably increase your site’s performance.

Based in part on a comment to my Task Management Apps post below, I decided to check out Toodledo. I’m still using OmniFocus as my primary personal task management solution, and I love it. But I find that its too complex to meet a key need of mine: capturing a quick list of things that I need to do that are top of mind. I realize the Inbox and other OmniFocus features are intended to support this kind of brain dump, but I just can’t seem to adapt to it for this purpose. So in exploring Toodledo, I found that the iPhone version is both useful and usable, but the web version falls short on the useable side of things. (more…)