Mortgage-ometer report

Back in March I wrote about some usable software from United First Financial called the Money Merge Account that helps you pay off your mortgage faster. I started using this software in March and by the end of April, we’d made an extra payment of $13,994.08 on the mortgage. I’m amazed and excited. With a few tweaks in our monthly spend plan that haven’t really affected our cash flow or living style, the time to pay off the mortgage has gone from 14 years down to 3.17 years!

The software is overall very usable, as I thought it would be. The learning curve to use it is short, help is readily available and it’s straightforward to implement the action plan.

Ease of building your action plan

My one point of confusion was on the credit cards because I always pay my balance off each month. The system does not allow you an option to do that. If you put in a balance on your credit cards, it will include monthly credit card payments, even if the interest rate is high on your cards. If you want to pay off your credit cards, you have to enter in a balance of $0.00, then enter in a new action with the estimated monthly amount you normally spend. When you pay the bill, you simply replace your estimated amount with the real balance you’re paying.

It’s very easy to enter your budget items and action plan, but not so easy to know what changes would help you reach your goal faster. What I did was to play with different options to see how they affected the goal.

I tried adding a savings account with a higher interest rate, which I thought would make things go faster, but it actually lengthened the time to pay off the mortgage. It doesn’t make sense, so I’m not sure why that happened.

Implementing the action plan

Sometimes the action plan changes really fast and sometimes it retracts actions that it told you to do–the system can seem a little szichophrenic at times. After every action you take, the system recalculates the action plan. I wish it would be a little more stable–a couple times I was getting excited to make that big monthly payment and all of a sudden it had moved to two months out! Then when I came back later, that action had returned to the plan. It would be nice if the plan were a little more stable. 

Support

Their support is awesome–they have an live chat button on the main page of the application labeled “Need help? Live chat” which I was reluctant to click on, but I did get stuck once and decided to give it a shot. They answered my question quickly and I was on my way again. They might want to change the wording on that button. Users are generally reluctant to admit they “need help”, and I was the same way. I had to really get stuck before I’d click. Once I’d tried it and found it a good experience, I was less reluctant to click on it again, but still hesitant.

All in all, though, I couldn’t be happier with my Money Merge Account from United First Financial. My hubby and I are dreaming about what we could do with our lives once our house is paid off.  

Previous articles on the Money Merge Account:

• Can Usability Pay off your Mortgage, part 2
• Can usability help pay off your mortgage?

One of the most important things in building web sites is content. How do you know how readable your content is? If you have Microsoft Word, you can measure it.

Active is better than passive

Your English teacher probably told you to avoid writing in the passive voice. Use the active voice–it’s more exciting to read. How well do you do at that? Use the  Passive Sentences Test to find out. For this test, the lower the score, the better.

Long sentences and words with lots of syllables are harder to read

To tell how easy your text is to read, you can use the Flesch Reading Ease score.  This test measures how long your sentences are and how many syllables are in the words you used. The higher the score, the better. Aim for something above 60.

Big words take more thought

Similar to the Flesch Reading Ease test, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test gives back something we can all relate to — a grade level, meaning the level of education needed to understand your text. Even if you’re writing for an educated audience, they appreciate having text that is easy to read. Face it; we’re all busy and swamped with so many things trying to grab our attention. We’re more likely to read things that we can easily read. Shoot for a grade level of 8 at the max.

So go find out how to measure your readability. If you’re writing for the web, just copy and paste your web copy into Word and check your readability scores.

Just for fun, here are the scores for this article:

• Passive voice: 0%
• F. Reading ease: 77.8
• F.K. grade level: 5.3

So it’s been a while since my post on usability helping to pay off your mortgage, and I thought I should give you a little update. I signed up for the money merge account with United First Financial a little over a week ago, and got my welcome e-mail last week, right in the middle of a very hectic week. I didn’t have time to sit down and “play” with it until yesterday, when I finally watched their training video (… they insisted I watch the training before I “touched anything”, so I did) and set up everything. I even scheduled a few bills with my online billpay so I could feel like I actually got started on our plan.

I am almost unsure I really believe that we’ll really have our mortgage paid off that fast. 3.67 years, it says, if I set the “aggressive scale” to 1, which is the lowest, most conservative setting. Did I miss something in our expense list? No, I entered everything I had in the budget, didn’t I? … but did I think of everything? Did I really include all our expenses?

To help in that matter, a couple things it would be nice to have is:

• A more interactive training video or perhaps a setup wizard instead
  • They are right–it’s not entirely intuitive to find everything you need to get started without watching a training video. But the training video is entirely passive–you just sit and watch someone do loads of things in a video and then you’re on your own. Sure, you can watch the video again, but it’s difficult to tell where the part that answers your question is in the video. If the training were more interactive, showing you how to do a piece and then giving you the opportunity to do that step, it might be more effective. To give them credit, they also offer in-person training, but I didn’t really want to go through (and wait for) a hand-holding session.
• Some way of reminding you of expenses you may have missed
  • Some automatic categories of expenses, perhaps, rather than making me enter all my own categories? I might not like your categories, but why not just have a sample set to start with? If I don’t like them, I could delete them, but at least they would serve as reminders of potential areas of expense I hadn’t taken into account.
• Use user-oriented language in the training video. It appeared to me that they got one of the engineers who built the software to do the training video–I caught some programmer words like “environment” in the training video–normal people don’t use those kinds of words.

Other little things that would help with usability:

• Instead of showing a dashlet at the top that tells me “Interest remaining”, how about “Interest saved”? I want to know just how much I’m saving with this $3,500 piece of software. That’s the most I’ve ever paid for a piece of software in my life!
• When I entered my credit card accounts in, I didn’t know what the balance was (because I pay them off every month, so I really don’t think of it as “having a balance”), so I started with a $0.00 balance. Once I found the credit card statements, I wanted to go in and edit the balance, but it wouldn’t let me! That was a little frustrating. I had to delete the account entirely, then enter them again.
• A way of recommending better ways to pay. If it would help me pay off my mortgage faster to use my credit card for certain payments, I would like to know that, but all the expenses I entered in asked me to specify how I wanted to pay. Absolutely, I want to control that, but how about a button that makes a suggestion on best way to pay?

All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with the software and hopeful that it will really work to get our mortgage paid off faster.

Many of us muddle through our finances–we go to work, get paid, buy groceries and other things and we pay our bills. If there’s anything left over, it often goes toward something frivolous or maybe we might pay off a little of our debt with it. Most of the time we don’t stop and think about where we’re at, where we’d like to be, or how to get there financially. Those of us that make an attempt at a financial goal like being debt-free often tackle it without a clear plan. That’s like going on a roadtrip without a map (or GPS unit)–you’re likely to get lost somewhere along the way.

Personally, I want to be completely debt-free. Last year we moved out of our spendy home in the country into a more affordable one in the outskirts of the city, paid off our car loans and my husband’s student loan, and we had enough “extra” to make life in our new home here pretty comfortable. The only debt we’ve got left to tackle now is the mortgage, and I’ve been hacking away at that by making a couple extra payments when we have a little extra left at the end of the month, but without any clear plan or sense of how much progress we’ve made or how much longer we’ll be paying on this house.

Then I ran across the Money Merge Account from United First Financial and it intrigued me–people were using this software program to pay off their mortgage in 1/3 to 1/2 the time. I talked to Joanne, the sales lady who’d invited me to one of their presentations, and she said she’d paid off her mortgage in 15 months. I was curious to see this software in action–what is it that makes it so good? 

So last week Joanne give me a demo of their software and I have to say say, as a usability practitioner, I’m impressed. From what I’d read about it, the software actually calculates the time value of money and determines the right time to put extra money into the mortgage. The calculations are quite complex, but they’ve hidden all that complexity behind the scenes and made it so simple to see where you’re at, how long it will take you, and how to get there.

Like a speedometer in your car, the measures of where you’re at, how soon you’re going to get there and how much it’s going to cost you are shown in three windows right at the top:

1. Payoff date
2. Years to payoff
3. Interest remaining

The way it works is you feed your monthly budget and income sources into the software. The Money Merge Account software then shows you a rolling 90-day action plan. As you go through and implement that plan (adding or subtracting any deviations along the way), the actual income and expenditures show up in the Money Merge Account tab and the mortgage-ometers change appropriately.

If you have an expense coming up that doesn’t fit in your monthly budget, you simply enter that into the plan. There’s a handy button there too–you can click the “Best time to buy” button and the software will actually calculate the best date within this window, financially speaking, for you to make that purchase. You can override that best time if you need that item sooner.

Another tool I thought was great is the “True cost” switch. If you turn this switch on, you’ll see what any extra expenditure (in terms of extra interest you have to pay on your mortgage) will REALLY cost you. Joanne tells me some people don’t want to know that, but for me, I’d love to see how any extra purchase is going to affect the goal.

The only problem is I wasn’t the one using the software in the demo. Joanne stepped through it all–perhaps it won’t be as easy when I am the driver, but it appears very usable. The buttons are big and clearly labelled, with icons to help users understand what each button does. The bulk of the action happens in 3 main tabs:

1. Action Plan: that’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s the listing of what you expect your income and expenses are going to be.
2. Money Merge Account: this tab isn’t named very intuitively, but once you understand what it is, it’s fairly easy. This is the tab that shows the actions you’ve completed (your expenditures and paychecks).
3. Cashflow: this is the tab you use to enter in changes to your cashflow. This is where you put in those extra expenditures (or windfalls, such as a tax return).

The software costs $3,500.00–some people might think that’s a lot, but considering what you’ll save in mortgage interest, it’s really a good deal. Joanne tells me with the budget I gave her (a conservative estimate), we can pay off our mortgage in 4.25 years and save about $37,000 in interest.

What I’m really excited about is that mortgage-ometer. It seems to me that if we keep our goals visually in front of us, we can’t help but win. If only they’d put them (along with any pending action alerts) in a gadget for my iGoogle homepage or my Windows Sidebar. There’s an idea for you, United First Financial!

Oh, another couple suggestions I have for United First Financial. On your web site:

1. Lose the cheesy music on the homepage. It is annoying!
2. Include a video demo of the software somewhere on the site. You’ve got usable software; don’t be afraid to show it! You could save your salespeople a lot of time, as well.
3. Consider offering a signup for a free trial period. The trial doesn’t have to be very long–perhaps 15 days–just long enough for someone to see if the software would really help them.

I haven’t purchased the software yet, but have already sent Joanne our budget. My husband thinks it’s a good idea, so long as I put some tile floors in our spend plan sometime this year.

Would you like to hear progress reports from our mortgage-ometers?

Last week facebook changed their terms of use and it caused a lot of stir on the Internet. Immediately there were blog posts criticizing facebook’s actions, and some (myself included) were thinking about giving up their facebook account, and disgusted that quitting facebook would not free them from the facebook terms and conditions. At the time I was wondering how much we should trust our personal information to services like facebook, but I had already done a lot of sharing of my inner self, including posting pictures of my family and writing the 25 random things about me (which took a little soul-searching). I gave these things freely to my friends, thinking my privacy settings would protect others from seeing them, but when the terms of facebook changed, it appeared my privacy settings were no protection. Fortunately, facebook changed their terms back to the previous version, but it still left me a little unsettled and got me wondering how trust issues like this affect users in general. 

Then one of my good friends commented on my post 11 things I learned from myFarm–she is reluctant to accept the gifts I’ve sent her on facebook because she doesn’t want to give the application permission to access all her information. That got me wondering:

• How much access do those facebook applications really have?
• What are they allowed to do with people’s information?
• What restrictions are placed on applications to protect users’ privacy? Are there any? Should there be?
• Why do they need access?
• And the big question: should we facebook users put our trust in facebook apps?

If you just go from the message that is displayed, facebook apps have access to:

1. Your facebook profile (gender, birthdate, relationship status, religious views, political views, activities, interests, favorite music/TV/movies, etc., contact information, e-mail address, phone number, IM name, address, web site, education, work)
2. Your photos (all the photos you’ve posted on facebook)
3. Your friends’ info (Does that mean my friend list? How much info about my friends do they have access to?)
4. Other content that it requires to work (What does that include? Haven’t they already given the app every bit of personal information they have about me and all my friends?)

So basically, facebook apps have access to everything you’ve shared on facebook other than perhaps your Notes and Posted items, but it’s not clear that those are off limits either.

Now to give facebook a little credit, they have posted “Guiding Principles” for applications to follow; however, there is nothing that forces application builders to adhere to these principles. Guiding Principle #2 is:

Applications should be Trustworthy. …

• Secure: Protects user data and honors privacy choices for everyone across the social graph …
• Respectful: Values user attention and honors their intentions in communications and actions …
• Transparent: Explains how features will work and how they won’t work, especially in triggering user-to-user communications …

Read the guiding principles here.

But we know not all facebook apps follow these principles. Some facebook apps apparently load adware to your computer.

Last November, facebook launched an application verification program, but when browsing facebook applications, I don’t see any verification information on any of them. Okay, I only spot-checked a few apps, but it makes me wonder: Is this really being implemented? I see no positive comments from the developers, who appear to be afraid of paying an exorbitant fee to get verified.

I was hoping some good news would come out of this investigation, but I really couldn’t find any good reasons for people to trust facebook apps–or to even know which ones to trust and which not to. If you are one of the people who was scared off by the warning message, perhaps you’re one of the smart ones!

The best advice is probably not to share anything on facebook that you don’t want to be shared publicly and to be careful about which applications you choose to trust. Read customer reviews and the application description, and take your best guess at how trustworthy they are.

I’m in the midst of prototyping a virtual credit card terminal in Axure and some of my most fervent wishes are resurfacing, so rather than sit here and stew about it, I am going to put my wishes out there so perhaps Axure will hear them and do something about it? Don’t get me wrong–I love Axure and am so thankful to have it. It makes life so much easier. But man, if it could only …

Some of this might already be done in a newer version (that I don’t have yet), but gosh I wish it would do the following:

1. Allow me to select a word or two and make them a hyperlink like real web pages do. It’s such a pain to have to put a box over the text I want to hyperlink. (Take some lessons from WordPress!)
2. Make mouseover effects easily–like change the color of a table cell or some text when moused over to indicate its clickability. Right now to change the color of a table cell, I’d have to overlay a dynamic panel and try to align it perfectly with the table cell and manage the states by going to separate windows. And then when the table cell changes size or shape, I’d have to realign everything and change all the states and … it’s just too much work. I have a lot of pages to do and I’m in a hurry to get this prototype done.
3. Put controls such as radio buttons and images IN a table cell like you can on a real web page. So if the table cell moves (like it tends to do when you’re wireframing), the control or image moves with it and you don’t have to go realign everything.
4. Change the look of the buttons–and allow for a few different types of buttons.
5. Use real cascading style sheets (CSS) like real HTML pages do, so I could import my style sheet and use the styles from my own CSS–and have them in the resulting prototype as real CSS styles. Wow that would be nice.
6. Make cleaner, more usable HTML, so we don’t have to have someone go back and recreate the HTML page from scratch and end up with a different look and feel than the wireframe. (Using real CSS would sure help.)
7. Not make a new image if I copy and paste an image from one spot to another. It’s the same image, folks! Why have a billion different images that look exactly the same? In fact, why not use an image library in a common images folder shared across pages (like, um, WordPress allows you to do) so if you want to use the same images on several pages, you can.
8. Allow me to set an action for several elements at once. Say I want the user to be able to select a row in a table, for example. Right now I have to go to every cell in the table and set the action for that individual cell. If the table has a lot of columns, it takes quite a while just to set the actions for one row.

If you use Axure and agree with my suggestions, let Axure know or leave a comment here so that they know that it’s more than just one user’s wishes.

Okay, enough sidetracking to Facebook, time to get back to usability.

There’s a very good 25 point web site usability checklist on usereffect.

Checklists won’t make your site usable–it’s best to usability test your site with the target audience and really sit back and watch what they have trouble with–but a checklist will help you avoid the most obvious mistakes so when you sit down to a usability test you’re not completely embarrassed that they can’t even tell what your web site is for.

I admit it, I’m hopelessly addicted to the myFarm game on Facebook. I myself call it a silly game, and yet I cannot keep away from it. I find myself stopping by myFarm several times a day. So to give myself (and the rest of you myFarm addicts) a little credit, I think there is some redeeming social value to be gleaned from myFarm-ing. (Other than by playing you are supporting a good cause.)

Here are a few things I learned (or re-learned) by playing this “silly” game that has become my virtual zen garden:

1. Tending virtual plants and seeing them grow, flower, and produce fruit can feed your need for color through a dismal, cold, and very gray winter.
2. The more you give, the more you receive and the richer you will become.
3. Being rich with friendship is better than being rich with money.
4. Know who the true farmers are in your circle of friends, and only send farm gifts to them. They are the ones who will appreciate them most—the others will see your gift as a nuisance.
5. Sending gifts to someone who does not give back is like loving someone who only takes and never gives. It can drain you of energy. Give to all your farm friends, but give more to those who give back. As in friendship and love, a circle of positive energy feeds both souls.
6. Sometimes the changes you make don’t take the first time. It’s okay. Just keep trying until it does.
7. Savor the moment, and save the best for last. My favorite color is purple, so I save the plum trees to harvest last so I can savor the color of them for a few more moments. It’s a small thing, but life is so much sweeter when fed with small moments of joy.
8. Tend to ALL the important things in your life. Escaping to the farm is good, but there is more to life than myFarm.
9. Have patience. Do not be too hasty to act. Wait for the button before you click it.
10. Beware of advertisers who wish to steal your attention away from your purpose.
11. Watch your bank account, but don’t be fanatical about it.

If you twitter or facebook and you order things that you have shipped to you, you’re gonna love this: TrackThis figured out how to take those hard-to-crack shipping APIs and let you track your packages via facebook or twitter.

I was all excited to try it, until I went to Facebook and discovered:

This application cannot be added to your Pages. Facebook applications for Pages can be specialized for certain Page categories (e.g. Restaurants or Bands). Either you have no Pages that fit the category of this application, or you have already added this application to your eligible Pages.

What kind of Facebook page do I need to be able to add it? That’s really confusing and is not making for a very good user experience. (Um, well, it’s denying me from even having a user experience! Hate that!) 

Well, maybe I’ll try it on Twitter.

Hey, I wonder if TrackThis would like to share some of their shipping API expertise with our comment-ers who are having difficulty integrating the buggers? See the comments on my shipping API post.

Yesterday on the Intellivative blog, there were two interesting blog posts:

1. AVS & CVV: When to use it and why?
2. Does CVV affect e-commerce conversion rates?

The second one is the most intriguing to me because it presents a quandary for e-commerce businesses.  CVV–that 3-digit code on the back of the credit card–is one of the recommended practices for fighting fraud; yet, if you use it on your e-commerce site, it appears that it might actually reduce the number of orders you may get from your site. The surprising mythbuster comes from the E-commerce Checkout Report from Get Elastic, which found:

Conversion rates were a full 40% higher where Top 100 retailers did not request a CVV (Card Verification Value), yet over 55% of them do.

The other interesting part about it was even though conversion rates were higher when the e-tailers didn’t use the card code, still over 55% of them still use it–which implies that either they didn’t know their conversion rate might be higher without it (did they try an A/B test on CVV code?) or that the fraud reduction benefits of the CVV code outweigh the potential higher conversion rate.

As a consumer, I think I would like it better if the site did ask for my CVV code–it shows they’re doing the due diligence to check for fraud which not only protects them, it helps me, the consumer. After all, if someone is out there trying to use my credit card (who wouldn’t have the CVV number), wouldn’t it be better if they were inhibited in their spending spree by web sites who do check the CVV code?

I always thank people who ask to see my ID with my credit card–they’re protecting me by doing that. Even though it’s a hassle for me to get out my ID and show it to them, I’d much rather they ask for it and make sure that I am the rightful owner of the card.

But apparently I’m an oddity. Either the CVV code is too complicated to find–or too much work to enter for many consumers shopping at the top 100 e-commerce web sites. Or maybe consumers just aren’t aware that the card code actually helps protect their identity and their credit card?

Thanks to Get Elastic for putting the work into this study and challenging our paradigms.