Innovation in Personal Financial Management: Culture or just numbers

I was recently bemoaning how far behind the USA the UK lags in personal financial management ("PFM") web-sites (see for example @mikelinskey's write up of Finnovate Start-up 2009, as well as in search of perfect PFM at Finovate).

Why is that Americans are so much more innovative?   Is it a cultural issue?   Surely that must be a factor - after all, America was seeded with those Europeans who had the gumption to up sticks and move there in the first place.

However it also strikes me that the USA is simply a much larger market (United Kingdom: Pop 61m, United States: Pop 306m).

So any mass retail online product such as PFM in the USA has an 5 times larger target market than the same in the UK - a 5 times larger prize to play for.   And financial services are a product that does not travel well, so your target market is stypically fairly limited to your national market.   Its not just the currency (although all those $ signs are usually the first clue that a product is used-based, as the US-based web-sites are surprisingly silent about the fact that they are US-targeted), the tax and product rules are also very country specific.

Where does that leave UK competitors?   Clearly the economics are, at least in this respect, less favourable towards innovation.

One solution is simply to copy and adapt solutions from the US.   The UK certianly has a track record of doing that.

On a policy level, it also demonstrates the value in belonging to a larger currency, tax and product regulatory unit.   The EU seems ready made for that purpose, certainly on the currency front, although there is a long way to go yet on the tax and regulatory front.

Writing and reading documents online

It strikes me that most of us were trained to prepare documents to be read offline - that is, in hard-copy format - and that this generally means that documents are prepared in "portrait" format.

However, increasingly, we are all working on PCs, which typically have screen that are in "landscape" format. As a result, I find most documents quite difficult to read online.

The solution, I think, is to write more documents in landscape format.

I find it quite useful, when reading landscape documents online, to put the programme into full page and full screen mode. Popular programmes such as MS-Word and Adobe reader both provide both of these options. This makes it easier to page up and down through the document, rather than having to scroll through it. I find paging much more predictable and natural than scrolling, especially where there are columns or other helpful layout features employed. When paging, the author can control the experience of the layout much more like they can in conventional print medium.

Of course, it helps a lot if the document has been laid out with that in mind. One of the disadvantages of landscape documents is that the line lengths tend to get too long for comfort. An easy solution to this is to use a column layout. Someone once told me that the optimum number of characters per line to use for online reading is 33. From a little experimenting on my part, I have found that this optimum translates roughly into three columns on an A4 landscape page with a font-size of 12. Three columns offers the added advantage of flexibility for graphics and tables and the like - they can typically span 1, 2 or all three columns.

So lets all start writing documents that are easier to read online, and print less of them out. And please feel free to add your own views and tips below.

Designing an Online Experience

I have been doing some work with online experience design lately and was reminded about the 7+-2 rule.

I remember reading somewhere that the human brain can deal with between 5 and 9 (7+-2) ideas at a time. So when you present information, it needs to be broken down into 7+-2 chunks. Put another way, you have 7+-2 goes to convince your reader that you have the answer to their problem, before they simply click away to another page.

Finally, here are a few useful sites for online experience execution:

1. css Zen Garden: clever site transformations using CSS (hint: click on the different layouts listed on the right hand panel).
2. Web Design Inspiration: a Flickr stream of images of well designed sites. Perhaps the most interesting part is reading different peoples comment reactions to each site - add your own.
3. css Beauty: css web design resources.