MoneyManager - GR3
>> Back to MoneyManager
Team members: Stephanie Chang, Qian Long, Isabella Lubin
Prototype Photos
Briefing
What is MoneyManager?
Answer: MoneyManager is a mobile app that allows students to create a monthly budget and enter their expenses so they can see how well they stick to their budget.
MoneyManager also allows its users to share their budget with other users. This way, they can show their parents that they are being responsible with their money.
Scenario Tasks
Task 1:
Register and create a budget with at least 3 different categories.
Task 2:
Enter several expenses.
Task 3:
Oh no! You make an error on the last expense. Fix it!
Task 4:
Share your budget with your parents.
Task 5 (only added in second prototype iteration):
Your brother Luke shares his budget with you. View a pie chart of his spending.
Observations
First Iteration
...
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
...
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.
Prototype Iteration
...
The first paper prototype we chose to create was the third design we created for our GR2 - a design that we thought was straight-forward and learnable, while still being reasonably efficient and safe. When performing user tests, however, it became apparent that our UI lacked certain key elements, and that other components were confusing for the users. Our second prototype was modified in two main ways: new elements added to make the UI more usable, and existing elements modified to make the UI more learnable. Throughout our user testing, we also experimented with different screen flows (that is, when the user pressed save on a given window, where the user was taken). It became apparent to us as we were user-testing that the flow of screens can greatly contribute or detract from the learnability of our UI, so in our second prototype we tried to ensure that our UI was less screen-flow dependent and that the location for different user tasks would be clear from anywhere in the UI.
...