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Sally Smith is a small business owner who has been running her bakery in the "real world" for around 15 years. She lends out money to friends and relatives, but since she is so busy managing her bakery, she often forgets who she lends money to when it’s not related to business. She would use this app to help her keep track of who she lends money to, and to keep a record of who pays her back. She She also wants the application to be able to let her track users that are not registered as PennyPincher users, since she often lends out money to her grandparents who do not use the internet. Overall, Sally hopes that this app would allow her to worry less about the money she lends to her friends and family.
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Current systems that attempt to solve the problems we are trying to solve fail because they are simple layers over a database, if not just the database itself. Paper/pencil is an obvious of a database itself and using Excel is basically forcing the user to interact directly with a "database" (in this case a spreadsheet). Other solutions may include some sort of money management applications that are not geared towards multi-user debt tracking (such as mint.com), but some users might try to use these applications to track how much money they are owed - not the most ideal solution.
PennyPincher is a system not a database interface
The whole idea behind PennyPincher is to replace all the current solutions with a solution that is tailored to the task of debt tracking. Therefore, as designers, we have the freedom to add any features that we think would help users solve their debt tracking issues. Some of the ideas that we have had on GR1 or have been recently are:
- A "payment schedule" where groups of users can set when debts have to be paid off.
- Payment disputes - users can dispute a particular debt that has been placed on them.
- Group formation - users can place themselves in different groups simultaneously
- Connections with people who do not use the application - users can use the app to "offline" track debt with a friend/family member that isn't technologically savvy (yes, people like that exist!)
These ideas that we have mentioned definitely add another dimension to the Penny Pincher application, providing users with features that are far beyond just the pure actions of saving and retrieving data. Our ultimate goal is to provide users with an interactive, immersive system to debt tracking and repayment - one that is simple, easy-to-use, and effective.
TA Feedback.
While I think you're going in a good direction, note that this project is barely a stretch - try to push yourselves to do something interesting with the UI to make a case for it being an interesting UI challenge. Make sure it isn't just a layer over a database.
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