Category Archives: Nadyne

user experience

every minute you talk is a minute your user isn’t giving you data

The summer intern program at VMware is robust.  My user experience team gets a few summer interns every year, and sets them loose on several forward-thinking projects.  They’ve got 10-12 weeks to go through the whole design process for their project.

This summer, I worked with one of our interns towards the end of her project.  She wanted to collect some user feedback about her work, and wasn’t sure how to go about it.  Her mentor suggested that she work with me to see where I could help her collect this feedback. After we had decided on our methodology, I assigned her the task of creating a walkthrough of her design to present to our users.

Together, we iterated on her walkthrough several times.  In her first attempt, she filled the entire time available to us by presenting her ideas and designs, not leaving enough time to gather feedback.  I gave her advice on what kind of research questions were appropriate and what kind of feedback she could get, and helped her hone her walkthrough so that she would get feedback that was directed and actionable.  I also gave her advice on her presentation style, how to answer questions, and what to do when she felt stuck.  Her final walkthrough was tight and focused, and she did a great job with it.

At the end of her internship, she gave a presentation to the whole user experience team about her project.  She talked about how she started, how she iterated on her design, how she collected feedback from stakeholders, where our research fit into her design.  At the end, she shared some quotes from team members which will stick with her.  One of them was from me:

Every minute you talk is a minute that your user isn’t giving you data.

(At that point, another designer leaned over to me and said, “yeah, that’s something you’d say”.  How well they know me!)

One of the things that we talked about as she worked on her walkthrough was brevity.  When you’re collecting data from your user, your goal is to collect as much actionable data as possible in the time that you have available.  This is just as true for a 5-minute survey as it is for a 2-hour usability study.  If you are talking, your user isn’t.  You can hear yourself talk any time, whereas you only have a very short window of opportunity with your user.  Therefore, when you’re collecting user data, you have to carefully craft what you present to them to maximize the data that they are able to give you.

Her first attempt at her walkthrough required a full hour for her to go through it.  What she actually presented to our users took about 10 minutes.  The rest of the time, we were able to ask questions and probe our users for feedback.  It took a lot of hard work to hone the focus of the walkthrough down to something that was so much shorter than the original, but it ultimately paid off.  We learned a lot, and were able to identify some important design improvements that could be made.

If I had to pick one message that a user experience intern would take away from working with me as we conducted research, I think this is a pretty good one.  I was very pleased to see her call that out as one of her lessons learned here at VMware.

user experience

what they don’t tell you about conducting research

Several times lately, I’ve been approached by a couple of the newer designers on my team who are conducting research for VMware for the first time.  In our conversations, it’s become clear that there’s a difference between what you learn about conducting research in school and what you learn when you’re actually out in the field conducting research.

Finding participants for research is always harder than you think it will be, and it takes longer than you think it will.  Not only do you have to get the right participant to take part in the study, scheduling them is difficult because you’ve got to work with your own schedule and theirs too.  When you’re asking others for leads, such as a Program Manager or a Technical Account Manager, you’re going to have to build a relationship with that person and help them understand your research goals to be able to get the right people.

You will always have more research questions than you can answer in the time available.  You’re going to have to prioritize your research questions.  While you’re actually conducting the research, you’re going to find additional research questions, which you might decide should be prioritized higher than the research questions that you’ve already identified.  Be aware that this will happen, and be flexible about it.

You have to get comfortable with silence.  Don’t rush in to fill space.  Let your participant think, let them consider what they’ll do or say next.  But don’t let the silence go on for too long, and don’t forget to prompt a participant who isn’t talking at all.  It’s a fine line to walk, and it takes some practice.

Conducting research isn’t just about having a solid research plan and protocol.  There’s a lot of mechanics surrounding conducting the research that can make or break your research.  The best research protocol won’t give you meaningful results if you can’t talk to the right people or if you have too many questions for the time available.

Nadyne, software

the road away from Quicken, part 4: using iBank

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Now that I’ve got my data imported into iBank, it’s time to actually put it through its paces on my easiest set of financial data (the household accounts).

The UI is a single window.  I’ve never thought myself a fan of Quicken’s windows-everywhere approach, but I’m not sure if I like the single window either.  My household account list has 10 accounts in it, which takes up the majority of the space available.  I don’t want to lose the summary pane, since that’s where the upcoming scheduled transactions are listed, and I very  much want to see them at all times.  I seem to spend a lot of time scrolling through the left navigation pane, and it’s getting on my nerves.

There’s several other UI annoyances.  iBank should win a special award for Most Gratuitous Use of Cover Flow.  I can mostly ignore that, no matter how much it makes me want to snigger.  The main UI looks like a chequebook register, which is natural, but poor use of spacing and fonts make it difficult to read for any length of time.  Poor use of fonts also haunts the reporting function.

Entering data

Entering data manually seems difficult.  While the main window looks like a chequebook register, there’s no blank line.  You’re forced to either use the “new transaction” button in the bottom bar (not the most discoverable location) or cmd-N.  Normally, I like cmd-N for this sort of thing, but it gets annoying if you’ve got a whole account that needs manual entry.  I also don’t like that cmd-N creates a new transaction inline wherever you’ve currently got selected instead of at the top or bottom.  I kept on creating new transactions before I realized where they were located.

From years of Quicken, I’m used to hitting the + key to get the date of a transaction to increase by one.  Actually, I don’t have to hit the shift key, just hitting = results in this.  Muscle memory made me try that, leaving me with = in the date field.  I know that this is a minor detail, but it’s something that I’ve come to rely on, and the absence of this detail is also annoying.

Using scheduled transactions

I started to add in my scheduled transactions.  There are two ways to enter a scheduled transaction.  One is to create an instance of a transaction, and then use a menu selection (or contextual menu selection, if you’re so inclined) to create a scheduled transaction from that.  When using this option, I didn’t see a confirmation that my scheduled transaction had been saved. It took a couple of minutes of looking around to see that it’s in the summary area, in the lower-left corner of the window (you know, the least discoverable area of the screen).  Also, in the left navigation bar, there’s a category called “manage” which has an item “scheduled transactions”.  In either case, the confirmation that the scheduled transaction has been created is pretty subtle, which doesn’t make me feel entirely confident in it.  On the other hand, creating a new scheduled transaction isn’t something that I do frequently, so perhaps this wouldn’t be so annoying after I’ve got everything set up.

The other way to do it is in the list of scheduled transactions.  That’s in the left navigation bar under the “manage” category, which I only found after I’d been trying to create scheduled transactions via the direct manipulation method and wasn’t seeing the confirmation messages.  Adding a scheduled transaction here allows more flexibility than doing so from an existing transaction.  Using an existing transaction assumes that you want it on a monthly basis.  However, there’s thing missing from the scheduled transactions: the ability to have a flexible amount for the scheduled transaction.  For example, my power bill is never the same every month, but it’s always due on the same date.  I’ll have to manually update the transaction amount when I actually make it.  This isn’t a big deal (after all, I have to make that manual step today), but it feels odd to not be able to specify that the amount isn’t fixed.

I haven’t figured out the difference between “transaction templates” and “scheduled transactions”.  Or, rather, I haven’t figured out why both of them exist in the UI.  In fact, I don’t get most of what’s in the left-hand navigation bar.

Reconciling accounts

After I got my new transactions entered, it was time to reconcile.  On my first attempt at reconciling a bank statement, I discovered that I had to reconcile all of my old transactions.  All of my imported information doesn’t have the reconciliation information.  This made reconciling last month’s statement impossible.  On the one account that I tried, I didn’t want to have to go through all six years of statements and do them individually, so I tried to choose all of the old transactions.  I had to click through six bloody years of transactions individually.  And then the numbers didn’t match up, so it was a bloody half-hour of wasted effort.  I deleted the statement, and the account is still unreconciled.

More research told me that I was going to have to go through all of the statements to do this to make sure that all of the individual transactions imported properly.  You can imagine the amount of obscenities that I started spewing at this point.  I’ve only got six years of data on this one, and the idea of having to go through all of my bank statements for that period of time is making my skin crawl.  This might be a dealbreaker for using iBank.

Creating a budget

Although I was pretty upset at the idea of having to go back and reconcile all eleventy billion transactions manually, I also tried to set up a budget.  In doing so, this made me realize that I need to invest time into fixing my categories.  It correctly imported the names of all of my categories, but set them as expenses.  That took a couple of minutes to fix, and then I went through the budget wizard to get started.  Most of it was self-explanatory, until I got to the screen titled “starting cash in envelopes”.  Hunh?  That sent me to the manual to learn that iBank’s budget can use the so-called envelope system of budgeting.

I ended up having to create three budgets to get one that was correct.  The second screen, “select accounts to budget” tripped me up.  It gives a list of all of my accounts, and they’re all checked by default.  The manual is no help, telling me to “[c]heck off the ones you want to include”.  Well, okay, they’re all part of my financial picture, so I want them included, right?  Wrong.  One of my accounts tracks my mortgage.  If I want to be able to include my monthly mortgage payment in my budget, I have to remove my mortgage account from the list of accounts.  Mortgage interest is already included, since it’s got a category, but I can’t capture this payment to my mortgage if I list it as an account to include in my budget.  Conceptually, I can’t grasp this at all.

I set up my budget as an annual budget.  While most of my transactions are monthly, there are some important ones that are biannual or annual.  My car insurance and property tax payments are biannual, for example.  However, this means that the only view that I get of my mortgage is of the year.  This makes it hard to see if I’ve met my budget for, say, my power bill this month.  I can only get the picture of my year-to-date, not this month.

Issues in setting up my budget aside, I don’t like how it shows my budget information.  The visual display of the information is poorly-done.  There’s a progress bar for each individual expense category, which has five states: empty (no transactions), green (on track), yellow (ahead of forecast, but still under budget), red (over budget), and a checkmark (exactly at the budget).  It’s difficult to read a line and see what’s going on.  Overall, viewing my budget and figuring out what’s going on is something that I can’t do in the budget view.  I’d hoped that I could create a report, but there only seem to be four built-in reports that I can’t do anything with.

Conclusion

I’ve spent three weeks using iBank seriously, and I end up with a headache each time I try to use it.  I don’t mean that in an “ugh, this thing sucks” kind of way, I mean that my head physically aches after using it.  Some of it is simply trying to get up and running, some of it is trying to figure out what they’re conceptually doing (the budget thing is entirely perplexing), and some of it is poor visual choices.

After three weeks, I just don’t see how I can use this seriously.  There’s the major hump to get over of having to reconcile all of my accounts for all of their transactions.  I don’t even want to imagine what that time investment is like.  Additionally, the childish budget design and difficulty of using scheduled transactions make it unsuitable for my needs in planning.

This is part four of an ongoing series about trying to move away from Quicken 2007 for Mac.  The previous three parts of the series are here:

Nadyne, software

the road away from Quicken, part three: importing data into iBank

This is part three of an ongoing series about trying to move away from Quicken 2007 for Mac.  The previous two parts of the series are here:

As I’ve mentioned before, I maintain two separate Quicken accounts: one with my personal data, and one with my household data.  The household data is the smaller dataset of the two, so I’m using that as my test case for importing into potential Quicken replacements.

iBank importer: choose file to importiBank has a 30-day free trial available on its website, so I downloaded and installed it.  On first launch, it detected that I didn’t already have a data file, and gave me the opportunity to import my data file from Quicken.  I didn’t expect that I’d have explicitly export my Quicken data into a QIF.  Exporting to a QIF took a few minutes, and resulted in a 360-KB QIF file.  Then I dragged the file into the iBank importer, which (oddly) gave me a teensy preview of the file.  I’m not quite sure what the point of this preview is.

After selecting my QIF for import, I was then prompted to save my document.  I was surprised that I was expected to decide the filename here, and not entirely sure what “document” means.  I’ve been using Quicken since the dawn of time or thereabouts, so I’m not used to thinking about how it stores its data.  I’m not sure what lies behind the design decision to force the user to think about both the name and location of their datafile.  Shouldn’t they at least provide a reasonable default?

After going through the last question of currency, it started importing.  iBank showed a determinate progress indicator, but didn’t give me an estimate of how long it would take.  My file took about a minute to import.

After importing, I was given a list of my accounts and account types, and asked to choose the most appropriate type for each account listed below.  It noted that iBank supports more account types than QIF1, but didn’t give any guidance as to why I might want to select a different type of account.  For example, my mortgage imported as the “liability” account type, and iBank has both “liability” and “loan”.  Why would I choose one over the other?  Can I change this later?  This drove me to check the “Quick Start Guide”, which didn’t help, so I had to go grab the full manual.  There, I learned that a loan has a payment schedule and a liability doesn’t.  So I changed the account type for my mortgage to loan, and also changed a couple of accounts from chequing to savings, and left the others unchanged.

At this point, I was out of time, so I quit iBank for the evening.  Overnight, I realized that my account data isn’t the only data that I’ve got in Quicken, and wrote that blog post.  As I was writing it, I opened iBank quickly to make sure that I had a couple of details right, and was surprised to see that iBank prompted me with the “Welcome to iBank” screen that I got on my first run.  On doing some research, I discovered that it’s a known bug with a workaround.  Additionally, I noticed that iBank wasn’t saving my window size and location information.  That was pretty annoying.  The workaround that seems to have resolved the document-prompt issue also seems to have addressed this issue.   While I’m glad that it’s a known issue with a workaround, it undermines my confidence in the application to hit such a bug first thing out of the gate.

My confidence is shaken, but still I’ll soldier on.  Now that I’ve gotten my transaction data into iBank, the next step is to try to actually use it.  Wish me luck …

  1. But not Quicken? I’m not sure what it means here, or why it would draw a distinction between Quicken and QIF. ↩
Nadyne

why is Twitter spam so obnoxious?

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Twitter spam seems to raise our collective hackles more than any other kind of spam. I admit it: I whinge when I get Twitter spam.  But I observed last week, after engaging in such a whinge, that I’d never dream of doing the same every time I get email spam.  I’ve even asked here whether a particular behavior was Twitter spam1.

Every time I get Twitter spam, I dutifully report it.  I’m never sure if it does any good, but I do it anyway.  Last week, Marco Arment commented on Twitter spam and motivation to report it, concluding that he’s not going to bother to report it any longer because it just seems like a waste of time.  I don’t share his assumption that Twitter isn’t doing anything (or isn’t doing enough), so I still report.  His post is one example of a perception that Twitter spam is a big problem, and that it’s only getting worse.

I don’t have numbers about Twitter spam, so I’m not sure whether it actually is a big problem, let alone one that’s getting worse.  The perception of the problem is one that I find fascinating.  Why is it that Twitter spam bothers us so much?  My theory2 is that there are several aspects of it that, together, make it bloody obnoxious.

A lot of Twitter spam is keyword spam.  There are some keywords that are guaranteed to get you spam responses: iPad, iPhone, laptop, etc.  It’s really galling to know that I’m going to tweet something and be entirely (and often accurately) convinced that I’m going to get spammed in response.  Compare this to email spam: there’s no obvious link between my action and the spam.  The spam that I get in email has nothing to do with anything I’ve ever done, it’s just an indiscriminate firehose.  I’ve been getting a bunch of Viagra spam on my blog post about appearing on the Angry Mac Bastard podcast, but while I find that amusing, it’s probably coincidence.

Twitter spam is addressed directly to me, and mentions/replies to @nadyne are designed to get my attention.  They’re supposed to be so important that they get their own stream, and I never skip reading @nadyne references.  I’ve seen people get testy when there’s some kind of contest or promotion that asks people to tweet something, but that’s rare, and I haven’t observed the same level of vitriol about that behavior as I have for the usual Twitter spam.  Email spam, while it might be addressed directly to me, isn’t highlighted in the same way, it’s just part of my inbox.

I can’t really scan past Twitter spam because it’s identical to everything else.  When I read my email, I scan my inbox to see what I can immediately delete.  Email spam is often, although not always, obvious enough that I can just read the sender/subject and delete it without wasting any more attention on it.  On the other hand, Twitter spam is roughly identical to the rest of Twitter.  While I’m probably not devoting any more time to reading Twitter spam than I am reading the subject line of email spam, I don’t feel as annoyed by email spam because the time spent on the subject of the email is much less than the time that I’d spend actually reading the email.

Are there other aspects of Twitter spam that make it feel so much more obnoxious than other forms of spam?

  1. And, for the record, the overwhelming agreement was that it was spam. Most of the responses came in via Twitter, which isn’t surprising. ↩
  2. As a researcher, I must point out that I have no data whatsoever to back up this theory. ↩
Nadyne, software

the road away from Quicken, part 2: thoughts on data

In my road away from Quicken, I’ve decided that the first potential Quicken for Mac 2007 replacement that I’ll evaluate is iBank.  Last night, I downloaded it and started the import process1.

After I imported my data into iBank, I realized that it’s only importing one type of data: my account data, which includes the transactions associated with that account.  When I’ve been thinking about importing data, this is exactly the data that I have been considering and most worried about being imported correctly.  However, my account data is only one piece of data that I currently have stored in Quicken.

Scheduled transactions.  I have a lot of scheduled transactions.  The majority of these scheduled transactions are monthly, but there’s biannual (property taxes, auto insurance) and annual (home insurance, subscriptions) too.  Knowing the amount of these transactions (or approximate amount, for things that fluctuate) and date means that I know how much money I need to have available at any given time.

Budget.  Closely related to my scheduled transactions is the budget.  I always have a pretty good idea of how I’m doing compared to my budget.  The budget gets revisited about once per year, or more often if circumstances dictate.  Not seeing my budget really threw me off when I first launched iBank, although in retrospect I shouldn’t’ve been surprised.

Online account information.  Several, although not all, of my accounts have online access.  Quicken has stored my usernames and passwords so that it can automatically download new transactions.

For each of these, I’m going to have to manually reenter or recreate that data.  In retrospect, I shouldn’t be surprised.  When I had been thinking about importing my data, even though I had only been thinking about importing my account/transaction data, I had assumed that I would be able to do that step pretty quickly and then be up and running.  I’m going to have to invest more time to get started.

This isn’t a complaint.  It’s certainly safer that other applications can’t access my online account information.  It just shows that I hadn’t fully considered exactly what it would take to make a transition out of Quicken.

  1. So look for another post on the topic soon. ↩
Nadyne

stop the data abuse!

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As a researcher, I always get annoyed when I see the wanton abuse of data.  Mashable’s article Google+ Users Are Nearly All Male is a great example of data abuse.

The data abuse starts by reporting data without noting anything about the methodology behind it.  Data is meaningless if you don’t know how it was collected.  For this article, they report on two different websites which claim to have analyzed Google+ user profiles.  Neither of these websites say that they’ve looked at all of the profiles, and neither of them note what method they used to sample the profiles that they did analyze.

The data abuse continues by ignoring the major differences in the data that is returned by the two sites.  One says that 86.8% of sampled profiles are male, the other says that 73.7% are male.  What explains a delta of more than 10 points?  I can come up with possibilities, but I don’t know if any of my potential explanations are correct.  In the case of any of the possibilities, it would tell us a very different story.  For example, if the difference is one of time (that is, one set of data was collected earlier than the other), then we’d learn something about the early-adopter curve.  If the difference is one of sampling method, then we might learn about the relative strengths of each of those sampling methods for this type of dataset.

What really bothers me about this breathless repeating of such statistics is that there is no attempt at analysis.  If we accept that the current Google+ users skew male, is this any different than the usual early-adopter curve? Or the early-adopter curve for social media? Or the early-adopter curve for new Google applications?  Data without analysis is meaningless.  Reporting on the data suggests that we should care, that there is something different here.  But it appears that no-one has bothered to answer such basic questions about the data.

We can do better than this.  Let’s stop the blind reporting of data, and instead expend some effort on analyzing the data.

Nadyne

the importance of “me too”

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Back in the dark dark days of the Internet, there was a culture clash between Usenet and AOL over “me too”.  Now, in a social media age, “me too” has made its comeback: retweeting on Twitter, “like”ing on Facebook, +1ing on Google Plus.

Remember that culture clash?  Usenet culture had a strict etiquette, coining “netiquette” to describe it.  Netiquette was largely about saving bandwidth in the days of slow and limited dial-up access.  Read the FAQ, don’t spam, trim replies to only include relevant text, make replies meaningful.  AOL users, when first let loose out of their walled garden in the mid-90s, didn’t respect that netiquette.  The calling card of an AOL user1 was adding “me too!” to a thread.  In nicer forums, this led to a gentle primer in netiquette, but it mostly led to the AOL user being flamed out of existence.

I admit that I was snobby about those AOL users in my Usenet days.  I failed to see the importance of “me too”.  “Me too” is an acknowledgement that not only did I hear you, but I agree with you.  It’s identifying a point of commonality, a shared point of interest.  No matter how much I want to believe I’m a special snowflake, I also want to have something in common with others.  I like learning that you read Terry Pratchett too2, that you listen to Cowboy Junkies, that you think that flour+water is a great restaurant.

It’s only now that bandwidth is plentiful that “me too” has resurfaced.  The very human desire for connection is ever-present, and it’s now become acceptable in a social media world to acknowledge that need for connection in a lightweight fashion.  I don’t have to write an essay about why I love Pratchett’s novels, I can simply click a button and let you know that we have this point of commonality.

The pendulum has swung the other way.  15 years ago, I never would have imagined posting “me too”, no matter how strongly I felt that connection.  Compare that to a meeting I was in last week.  I was participating in a portfolio review of a candidate, and I asked a question contrasting one of the candidate’s statements with something they had said earlier.  The person sitting next to me looked up and said that he’d just jotted down a note that he wanted to explore that question more.  Further down the table, another interviewers raised his hand and said, “plus one”.  This prompted a couple of others to do the same.

While “me too” is important, there’s also a danger to it.  Our discourse shouldn’t be limited to simplistic statements of agreement that can be fully captured by the two characters of +1.  There are times when that essay about why I love Pratchett’s novels is not only welcome but needed.  Likewise, we need to be able to have a nuanced but respectful discussion about why we disagree on a topic.  We need to acknowledge our commonality, but such acknowledgement shouldn’t be the only communication.

  1. Luser, if you prefer. ↩
  2. And I like it even more when you get it when I call him Pterry. ↩
Nadyne, VMware

bored people quit, engaged people stay

I’m only 8 months into my time at VMware, so there’s no way that I could be bored yet.  But I still read bored people quit from Rands in Repose and found something that applies to me.  He’s talking about how geek managers can avoid boredom in their people, and mentions this:

In terms of a low-cost means of keeping your team content, the simple act of saying, “I know where you want to be and I’m thinking about how to get you there” is a way to demonstrate you care about the growth of your team.

Now that I’m reasonably comfortable with my role and my team, I’ve started to think about what my next career move should be.  I want to grow in my career.  I’ve already told my manager that I want to get to the Staff level here, but there’s also an attendant question of whether I want to continue up the technical track or move into the managerial track1.

In my weekly meeting with my manager this week, we talked about the status of my current research projects.  I’ve also got a couple of pet projects that are more internally-facing to help my user experience team rock, and I now have the green light to put some more energy into those.  In that meeting, my manager explicitly talked about my desire to move up and some short-term things that I should do to move that along.  I went back to my office thinking, “this is SO the right place for me”, banged out a bunch of emails and invitations to get some things moving, and went home with a glow.  As I talked to my husband over dinner that night, I realized that what really got me excited about this was that my manager had heard what I had said, put some thought into it, and came back with specific and direct feedback about how I’m doing so far and the next steps to take.

I’ve got to say: this engineer ain’t bored. 😀

  1. VMware allows its employees to move back and forth between the two tracks, which I think is a good deal for everyone. ↩
Nadyne, software

the road away from Quicken (part 1)

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I’m an old-skool Quicken user.  I’ve been using it since I was working on my first undergraduate degree.  Today, I use it for pretty much everything in my financial life.

Back in my Linux days, I kept a Windows partition only for Quicken.  When I became a Mac user in 2001, I dutifully bought Quicken for Mac.  I’ve been disappointed in it from the beginning due to its lack of features and its unreliability.  I’ve upgraded faithfully on each version (with an exception, more on that in a minute) in the hopes that one or both of these issues would be addressed.  The former has, in a scant handful of cases; the latter possibly has, too, although not nearly enough for my tastes.

But then the Intel transition happened, and Intuit made the decision that they would start over with a new version of Quicken for Mac instead of transitioning their existing codebase to Intel.  Having been on the Office:Mac team during the Intel transition, I have a reasonably good understanding of why they made that transition.  I understand the decision, even if I don’t really like it.  The new Quicken was delayed multiple times, and Intuit finally shipped Quicken Essentials for Mac (QEM).  On its release, Intuit said that it didn’t have all of the features of its predecessor, Quicken 2007 (Q07).  I relied (and continue to rely) on some of those features, so I continued stumbling along with Q07.

OS X 10.7, Lion, changes that.  Q07 is my last PowerPC application that requires Rosetta, and Lion no longer supports Rosetta.  In all of my years of dissatisfaction with Quicken, I’ve looked at various alternatives, but have rejected them relatively quickly as not meeting my needs.  However, if I want to stay current with my OSes1, something’s gotta give.  Q07 has got to retire, and I’ve got to figure out what that is.

I currently run two instances of Q07.  One is on my personal Mac for my personal finances, one is on the household Mac for my shared finances with my husband.  He might also run an instance of Quicken for his personal finances, but I don’t use his Mac so I don’t know.

My personal finances consist of the following active accounts:

  • chequing account
  • credit cards
  • stock account
  • stock account
  • 401(k)
  • IRA
  • Roth IRA
  • mutual fund account

The household finances consist of the following:

  • mortgage
  • chequing account
  • savings account
  • credit cards
  • life insurance
  • our home2

What do I need in a Q07 replacement?

  • Import of my existing Quicken data.  I actually wouldn’t mind it if I didn’t have to import all of it.  After all, since I’ve been using Quicken for well over 15 years, I’ve got accounts that are long past closed.  I think it’s safe to say that I don’t have to import the data from a mortgage that I had more than 10 years ago.  There’s not an easy way to separate out such old data from my existing data file3  But I do want to have access to my full history of my current accounts.  I like being able to see how much progress we’ve made on paying off our mortgage.
  • Downloading of transactions.  I’ve got a lot of accounts, and so the ability to download my transactions makes managing everything a lot easier.
  • Downloading of security prices.  Okay, so I only own stock in three companies4, but I still like to see how they’re doing.  This also includes the mutual funds in my 401(k) and IRAs.
  • Budgeting.  I maintain a budget (both personal and household), and I want to be able to see how I’m doing.
  • Eye candy.  Yes, I admit it, I want some eye candy.  For example, Q07’s graph showing me how my net worth has changed over time gives me a nice warm fuzzy.  Of course, the graph showing me the hits that my 401(k) and IRAs have taken have the opposite effect.  Sigh.

Q07 has some features that I don’t use:

  • Dashboard widgets.  I don’t use Dashboard anyway, so I don’t care about the widgets.
  • iOS app.  Well, this strictly isn’t a Q07 feature, but I still haven’t felt the need.
  • Bill pay.  I use my credit union’s website for this.
  • Printing cheques.  I write one cheque per month5, and I don’t even own a printer.
  • Integration with other apps.  I don’t need iCal reminders, and I’ve got an accountant for my taxes.

That’s the state of my financial union right now.  Next up is to compile a list of the possible contenders and rank them.  After that, I’ll start downloading trials of the contenders (where applicable, that is) and see how they compare when running side-by-side with Q07 today.  Look for more posts in the future.

If you’ve got a favorite financial application that you’d like to recommend (or, an application that you’d like to recommend against), the comments are open.  You’ll get special bonus points if you note how well they will (or won’t) fit with the financial institutions or requirements that I’ve listed above.

My fear is that the winner is going to be Quicken for Windows.  I’m sure that this makes me a bad VMware employee, but I don’t actually run Fusion6 on my Mac at home.  If I’m going to have to install Fusion, then purchase and install Windows, I’m not sure if I want to reward Intuit by buying another copy of Quicken.  This does mean that if you’ve got Windows financial software options, I’m open to those as well, although my preference is definitely for Mac-native apps.

  1. This is likely, since I’ll probably get a new Mac later this year. ↩
  2. Not an account, of course. Honestly, I put this asset in Quicken so that the total line in my list of accounts doesn’t show that I’m a trillion dollars in the red. ↩
  3. At least, I’m not aware of one.  Please do comment if you know of one! ↩
  4. MSFT, AAPL, and VMW, if you must know. ↩
  5. My HOA isn’t set up for online bill pay. ↩
  6. Or that other, lesser, virtualization software; nor Boot Camp. ↩