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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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- Super simple user-interface - Should not take more than a few seconds to input a debt or payment of debt
- Approvals - When another person places a debt on him, he wants to be able to approve it so that people do not make up claims for money.
- An actual "system" instead of just an interface for a database.
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- User establishes a connection with another user and can now add transactions
How often used? - Depending on the user, but should be used fairly infrequently as users usually only incur debt with friends
2. Adding
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a transaction
Goal: Allow users to input an amount that a particular person owes them
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- Set the amount that another user owes them
- Input the name of the transaction (what it was for)
- Send the transactionApprove transaction
Preconditions:
- The two exchanging parties must have an established connection.
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- A transaction will be sent from one party to another.
- Approval message will be displayed to the person who owes money
- Upon approval, net balance between the two parties will be updatedThe receiving party will have a discreet UI notification that their debt has increased for the debt sender.
How often used?
- This task will be performed very frequently as its the core of PennyPincher
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- Determine fixed time intervals for which to "close" a statement/transaction period and inform users of due payment
- (Potentially) Allow users to dynamically decide the length of the statement/transaction period before closing
- "Nudging" people to pay back their debt through discreet, yet effective notifications when the statement period is closing.
Postconditions:
- Inform all users involved when a statement period is closed and settlement payment is due.
Depth Analysis
Current Solutions are Databases
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
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.
- 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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