Searchengineman

Can you think of a website that you would give a 5 to?

I’m sorry you’ve had problems with Mint, why don’t you contact me offline and maybe we can figure it out? We support thousands of banks and things will not always be smooth, but I’m sure we can do something to fix it for you. My email is jason at mint.

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. The update to the color and feel was part my personal preference and part my desire to make the content of the page pop more than the background. Gone is the (relatively) heavy gradient, gone are the now cliché reflections and perspective adjusted screenshots. I also wanted to make the site less “web 2.0″ and more fresh / earthy to fit in with the name of the company. On a side note, it seemed that everyone had ripped aspects of our site off since TechCrunch 40, from BoulevardR to Intuit. I felt the need to innovate here and do something a little different.

As for removing the bulleted list of benefits, frankly there was too much text on the last site. You had the header, subheader, 3 bulletpoints WITH supporting paragraphs, then 6-7 more points– some overlapping with the top 3. As I said in my latest GigaOM article, no decision was made there, so we had both things!

The homepage as a whole represents more of an exploratory philosophy as you mentioned, where instead of dumping absolutely everything on it, we want to encourage exploration to the other pages– which I spent A LOT of time on as well.

As for the demographics, I can’t really comment on what our audience is, but the copy was based off of thorough user research, and I think every Valley business wants and needs to expand beyond the TechCrunch crowd.

@Chris

Thanks for signing up. Patrick you should too… it’s pretty much automatic and will email you weekly once you set it up. Don’t login if you don’t want to!

Very interesting comment on the ‘free’. Mint will always be free, I did that to draw the eye, as demonstrated in Patrick’s video. He ‘fell for it’ so to speak. But I’ll have to see if others feel the way you do. It could also be read as a qualifying statement, which it isn’t!

To your point about the quotes, as a designer I need to set priorities in the information. I can’t have every block of text on full blast, so the testimonials are there to support the headline, but not to overwhelm. The brand names of the papers give the quotes meaning.

As for your comment on the brand, I guess you’ve lost me. I’d like you to have a look at my blog http://blog.novaurora.com to learn a bit more about what a brand is.

Phew. Thanks guys. Lots to think about here.

Regarding the site design. They appealing to women? Because this color scheme is entirely too soft. I like the color scheme of their app instead. And I agree with y’all on how nothing stands out besides the orange button. Sign up in under 5 minutes – it took less than that.

The entire billboard area means nothing to me besides the headline. The Free anchored on top is perfect but does make me feel like it’s going to go away and not be free anymore.

The testimonials are so light grey it makes me feel that they’re not really important anyways. I’d just lose those. I hate when they don’t show the names of the people who say it. If I get the WSJ Janitor to say “I love TargetScope” can I quote that from Wall Street Journal?

The bottom buckets stand out because they’re full color. I’d like to see that more balanced up top.

Not sold on the brand. What’s it tell you? Tells me they bought a simple catchy domain name. Because they’re not trying to anything with the brand. Maybe that’s all you need nowadays… a good domain.