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User Testing

Briefing

This app is to keep track of your money spending. You can take pictures, it can save location of where you spent the money, keep track of how much you are owed and owe.

Tasks

Task 1

You walk into a grocery store and pick up some items. You then proceed to the checkout counter and buy a few items. Immediately after you want to keep track of this by creating an expense using your app. You take out your app and take a photo of the receipt and then record the expense. Half of the items that you purchased are for a friend, and you want to record how much of this expenditure he owes you.* Create an expense with photos

• Create an expense and attach an IOU to it

Task 2

You remember you spent money at a grocery store a week ago, near central square. Your friend has just paid you back. Navigate to the record of the expenditure and mark the debt as paid off* Find expense from a week ago, from Central Sq.

• Mark an IOU as paid

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Task 3

You have just created a record, but you realize that the time & date settings on your phone are misconfigured and the expense was listed as having come from the future. Navigate to that expense and fix the time & date it was made.* change the date to March 1st, save the change

• start changing the record, but go back without saving

Comments

Below are the various comments that we got from various users during testing.

User 1

• One of the confusing parts of the design was just having a “Save” button. What might be better would be to have a back button on viewing each entry so that the user can go back to list.
• Something that might be useful and might enable the user to post additional information that might be relevant to their finances would be to have a memo section to jot down notes with regards to the user’s finances, payments, or other financial information.
• In order to keep better track of the user’s debts it might be useful to have a net debt feature that allows the user to see all their debts by name/amount instead of having to go through them one entry at a time. Furthermore, it might be beneficial to keep new entry of debts with expense entry.
• A general idea for improvement would be to organize the map, time, list features more efficiently.

User 2

• An improvement to the tag system would be enable auto-complete while the user is typing for different tags.
• The user doesn’t think it’s important/would rather not save locations with regards to where said user spends their money.
• The “add debts” features needs to be cleaner and somewhat doesn’t make sense/it needs to be better flushed out.
• Selecting an in item on the map should bring up details of expenditure that the user had made at the particular location.

User 3

• User had trouble understand the GPS feature of the app.

• Selecting an in item on the map should bring up details of expenditure that the user had made at the particular location.

User 4

• User had trouble understand the GPS feature of the app.
• User confused the “add debts” button because they understood it as an “Ok” button.
• User had trouble using the zoom feature on the map.** User tried to click directly on it to zoom (took some time to understand)
• One suggestion for an improvement with the overall design would be to enable a keyword search for map screen so that the user can get to a specific location more efficiently.

User 5

• User had trouble using the zoom feature to find locations where his expenses had occurred.
• User thought that a better notification system was needed when using the map feature in order to open a list of expenses near a specific location.

User 6 (Drunk)

• User did not understand the use of the (Tags) field on <Record Expense> screen
• User also could not find the (Add Debts) button, which is required to attached debts to a recorded expense.
• When looking for how much user’s owes or is owed, the user found and understood the (Net Debts) menu button, and pressed it.

Changes

After the rounds of user testing, we made the following changes

Round 1

<View Expense> (OK) -> (Save)
On the <View Expense> page, we changed the (OK) button into a (Save) button. The initial plan was that the user would go into this screen knowing he was editing a old record, and hence (OK) would indicate that he was satisfied with his edits.
However, we found that users generally thought of it as viewing old records. Hence most of them had no idea what the (OK) button did. A (Save) button made it clear that its purpose was to save any edits made.

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<List>
and that each page would have two buttons above the page to navigate to his two siblings. This also afforded us very large buttons, which would at the same time display a summary of the state of the other two pages (e.g. the buttons on the list view would should the current time-range shown as well as the approximate location.
However, we found that this did not sit well with users, who did not immediately grok the fact that the three pages were siblings and thus interconnected. We decided to change it from buttons (to navigate from page to page) to a single tab menu with the three items (Time) (Map) (List). The tabs would make it clear to the user that the three pages are related, and that he was merely swapping between them.

Round 2

<Top Menu Bar> (Record Debts) -> (Net Debts)
<Record Expense> aded (Add Debts)
On the top menu bar, we removed the (Record Debts) button and changed it to a (Net Debts) button. At the same time, we shifted the (Add Debt) button to the <Record Expense> page. This was because Debts were added as part of the expense which the uses inputs in <Record Expense>, and having it as a separate tab on the top level menu distracts a user from that fact.
Furthermore, we realized quickly that users wanted a way to fnd out how much they owe to different people in aggregate, without having to dig through the list of past expenses in order to find out what debts they had and which ones had to be repaid. Hence we created <Net Debts> as a top level menu item, allowing user to quickly list the people they have outstanding debts to/from.

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