I am one of those people who like to keep their financial affairs in order. To help with this task I have used MS Money since about 1993. A while ago problem with Money made me decide to change to Quicken. It was then that I realized the difference between the two classes of interface you find in the software world: broadly speaking they are dialog boxes versus pages.
Dialog boxes developed out of the character mode world where screen real estate was very limited. These days typical Windows applications have dialog boxes scattered throughout. A dialog box works by popping up over the underlying screen, and displaying relevant, context sensitive information when it is needed. Although dialog boxes work very well in some situations, they tend to be over used. Quicken (2006 version) is a very good example of this. When working with Quicken it is very easy to get into a situation where so many dialog boxes are open that you have no idea of where you are. And at that point the user interface has failed. What also shows up in Quicken is that dialog boxes do not scale. They work well when deployed on a small scale, but quickly break down when they are over used.
Although MS Money uses dialog boxes in many places, they also use pages to control many options. Because pages are larger, you can get more on them without cramming everything in (just like printed page layout, white space is important to help make sense of everything presented.) But there is something else going on here: it turns out that the paged interface is just easier for people to use. Our brains seem to be wired that way. As evidence I offer the way the internet has caught on. I think a large part of the success of the internet is that people relate to pages much better that they do to dialog boxes.
I spent about three months reviewing Quicken before taking the plunge and changing over. Doing my homework, reading the reviews, deciding that this was the right thing to do, etc. But very soon after converting my files and using it with real data, it became apparent that a huge mistake had been made. Now I have been working with software for over 10 years, so learning a new package should not be that hard. Yet even allowing for the fact that Quicken was a new package, I was taking 2 to 3 times longer to get the same tasks done compared to MS Money. And that was after using Quicken for two months. I can only attribute the difference to the user interface. And a large part of that is the difference between over using dialog boxes and the page interface.
About six months later when Microsoft release their new version of Money that could import Quicken files I swapped back. And, finally, I can balance my loan accounts again (you simply can't do that in Quicken.). And I get my accounts done in less than half the time it too with Quicken.
(Note: In this article I am not reviewing Quicken. I am simply comparing the Quicken user interface to the one in MS Money to illustrate the difference between the two approaches. If you have been using Quicken for years, it obviously works for you.)
