Why Cha-Ching is everything wrong with Mac software
I confess. The title of this post is strictly to inflame the Mac community into sending me hate mail. Please, feel free to barrage me with your naughty words! Post comments or write me at vox@ponyloaf.com.
Working at Microsoft in the home productivity software division taught me users were desperate for a simple-to-use money management software package. The Money team saw the opportunity and tried valiantly, with their Money 2005 suite of products, to nail this growing user segment. But Money was, is, and always shall be a heavy, over-architected, hard-to-use product. This is strictly by design. With a decade of legacy and a loyal user base used to features and functionality, pulling Money in the minimalist direction would take nothing short of a re-architecture. To scrap their product and start anew would spell disaster for their P&L.
So, when I saw a piece of Mac software trumpeted as a "slick new money management app," I was intrigued. Maybe they finally got easy money management nailed. The software, called Cha-Ching, is heralded on their website as "the fun and easy way to manage your cash." One of my co-workers went so far as to say, "I wish I had a Mac so I could run Cha-Ching." Oh, this must be the Quicken killer users have been waiting for! Cha-Ching will usher a bold new era of money management.
However, after using the application for 5 minutes, I realized Cha-Ching demonstrated everything wrong with modern Mac software. In the spirit of trite, easily digestible lists people seem to love these days, I'll give you the four reasons why Cha-Ching, and other vapid applications of its kind, is bad for the Mac.
1. Look! It's pretty!
Slick! New! Shiny! Look at those gradients! Wow, this really must be a fantastic money management application! I mean, it looks like it came straight from Cupertino. If it looks like a Mac, it must work like a Mac!
Why are Mac people drawn to reflections and gradients like moths to a flame? Misconception #1 regarding Good Design: a good graphic design begets a great user experience. Mac software seems to fall in this trap more often than web or Windows software and it's killing the platform's reputation. As people become more accustomed to great user experiences, Mac software and the Mac platform look more and more like candy-coated dung: pretty on the outside, but still a pile of crap.
Lesson #1: Make your Mac apps more than just prettiness.
2. Only $14.95 to find all of your bugs? I'll take two.
My initial visceral reaction, before ever using the software, was complete disgust for putting a trial period and a license structure in place for beta software. By definition, beta software is incomplete and buggy. Why are you compelling me to pay for it?
I believe this is an unfortunate misuse of the principals in Getting Real, the book written by amazingly productive 37signals folks regarding their software process. In this book, 37signals encourages you to have a bias towards action and releasing, so you can get software in the wild to see if and how well it works. They are all about rapid iteration and cutting feature sets down to size for your v1, v2, etc. Simplicity is king.
However, releasing a beta and timebombing it so I'm forced to pay you for your buggy software doesn't seem like the direction we should be going in software. So I have to pay to test it, now? Is that user-focused?
I have received comments saying my characterization of Cha-Ching's licensing is not fair; that, my reduced price license purchased during beta is a lifetime license, where you would get upgrades post-beta as well. And that I'm not being compelled to buy as much as "supporting [their] cause" (quoted from the Cha-Ching's website.)
First, the product is timebombed after 30 days. Betas should not compel you to pay for the product, period. Put an expiration date, requiring me to download the new version like Omni products do. But don't make me pay for it.
Second, as my friend isnoop so eloquently put it: "You just can't ignore the fact that the app sucks. That's like saying 'pay me $15 for a wet dog turd and we'll give you free flies for life!'"
Lesson #2: Charge for your Mac apps once they are valuable.
3. You can take pictures of your things!
In a misguided attempt to figure out other compelling user scenarios to put on their product website, the makers of Cha-Ching thought it would be pretty cool to take pictures of your things with your built in iSight camera.
At long last! A money manager that lets me take pictures of things while I make funny faces at my iSight with my little, ironic Nacho Libre mustache!
Why would I possibly want to take pictures of transactions I'm entering in a ledger? There are probably 100 other personal money management use cases I would have spent my effort on that would make a real difference in software quality rather than the easy-to-code iSight integration. Instead of Mac software developers creating a feature for the sake of putting it on the box or the website as yet another bullet point, why doesn't Mac software focus on what I want it to do?
If you must keep the photo feature because it's just so awesome, figure out compelling user scenarios that would be enabled by it. A home inventory system, perhaps?
Lesson #3: Make sure every feature in your Mac app is there for a good reason.
4. So, what does it do again?
This is the crux of my complaint about new Mac software and what I care about the most, being Mr. User Experience guy. There was little thought from the Cha-Ching developers about what people want to use a money manager for. The reason the Internet heralded Cha-Ching as the new hotness is because Quicken is so damn lame people were craving an easy-to-use money manager to kill it. However, no one wants an easy-to-use money management application that does nothing.
My only guess as to why this was released into the wild is because the 37signals way of developing software was brainwashed into these folks and they actually believed they had a solid beta. It's a real shame we're starting to see the simplicity pendulum swing too far to the no-features-for-$16.95 zone.
Lesson #4: Make sure your Mac app does something meaningful.
Comments
There's a tendency for shareware authors to build "flashware" -- something splashy enough to generate web buzz. That's what Cha-Ching looks like to me. But that, it seems to me, is true for shareware in general.
Every one of your "lessons" is equally valid if you remove the word "Mac."
1. The app is pretty and functional. My accounting needs are (apparently) less than yours and for what I need, far from 'candy-coated dung,' Cha-Ching works fine, even in its current state. The user experience isn't perfect, but they called it the 0.2 (now 0.3.1) release and made it clear that they're working on additional features and usability.
2. How is this different from any other beta software that expires after a month or on a certain date? The 15 bucks is for the chance to buy a non-expiring license to it at a discount BECAUSE it's still in beta and incomplete and buggy. Most betas are timebombed. You can use them until a full version is released at which point you have to pay to continue using them. This is no different--free trial, pay to keep, the difference is just that it's not a timebomb, it's a set time limit...big deal.
3. The pictures--admittedly it's a bit silly, but why not? It's fun! That's half of the purpose for the app, a money manager that is fun. Maybe you don't care about the feature, but obviously people do, otherwise they wouldn't be buying it.
4. Again because you're not the target market you can't discount its usefulness altogether. For my finances I want 1. a transaction log and 2. to see my net worth at any given time. Cha-ching does this perfectly. It makes is extremely simple to enter transactions, view them flexibly (with tags, smart drawers etc.) and see a running total of everything.
If you'd have taken the article from a different perspective, maybe attacking the app based on false-claims made on their website site or some other angle, you might have been able to get somewhere, but as it is, you've just pointed out what is blatantly obvious the first time you visit the Cha-Ching website which is "this is beta software, there are still a lot of missing features but we want it to be different and fun and if you want to support us you can buy it right now at a discount, otherwise try it for free."