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Your brother Luke shares his budget with you. View a pie chart of his spending.
Observations
First Iteration
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Task 1 (Register and create a budget)
All of the users were able to register quickly and without any difficulty. When initially presented with the budget creation page, our first user had trouble figuring out what she should type into each text field. We did not have labels on the fields, and had originally thought of putting default text into the fields, but did not prototype that feature. While the first user had initial learnability difficulties, her entries remained in the text fields (we had trouble erasing input between rounds) and other users were able to quickly grasp the purpose of each field.
Another issue that users ran into was in adding and saving budget categories. Some did not notice the “Add another category” or “Save” buttons and spent a good deal of time looking for a “Save and add another category”-type feature. Others were not sure whether the “Save” button was for an individual category or for the entire screen. Finally, several users pointed out the lack of a “Total Budget” field that would let them quickly view the sum of all their category allocations.
Task 2 (Enter some expenses)
Users generally had no trouble entering expenses in the first prototype iteration, although one user requested the ability to save expenses sequentially.
Task 3 (Edit an expense)
Users had trouble finding the screen to edit the expense. Although the budget summary page had arrows as affordances for viewing individual category details, most users did not notice these. When taken immediately to the category summary pages after entering an expense, or when they finally managed to navigate there, they were able to easily edit and save changes to their expenses.
One user noted that the tops of the budget summary page and the category summary page were identical, and that there could be potential confusion when using the app in real-time.
Task 4 (Share your budget)
Several users had trouble finding this feature. When we asked them to complete this task, users initially tried to view the budgets that had been shared with them by others.
Second Iteration
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Task 1 (Register and create a budget)
The registration interface remained the same as the first iteration as no one had any trouble with that task. For creating a budget, we noticed a problem that there was no way to save the total budget field. Also one user said that it was inefficient to save each category individually and would rather save all of the data for all the categories at the end
Task 2 (Enter some expenses)
No changes were made to this task since the first iteration.
Task 3 (Edit an expense)
We added more some text affordances to help users click on the categories in the summary page. One user confused the “edit” label on the actionbar (used for editing budget) for editing an expense.
Task 4 (Share your budget)
Users had no trouble navigating to this feature because a button linked directly from the home screen.
Task 5 (View pie chart of a budget shared with you)
Users had no trouble with this task. This was a new task added in the 2nd iteration after we removed the feature that allowed users to track their budget over multiple months and added the feature to allow users to view a pie chart of their monthly budget and spending.
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