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Walk-Through of our Scenario for Design 1:
Luke logs into the moneymaker MoneyMaker app and is greeted by screen 1. He He selects register"Register", and is lead led to screen 2. He He enters his email (skywalker@imperial.edu) and creates a password, then selects register"Register". He is lead led to screen 4, where he selects “create“Create/modify budget”Budget”. He is then lead led to screen 5. In In the budget per month box, he enters $300. Under Under the “food” “Food” category he enters $175, under clothing "Clothing" he enters $75, and he adds a new category that he calls “recreation” and assigns “Recreation”, assigning $50. He He selects “Save Budget”, which returns him to Screen screen 4. On Screen 4this screen, he selects “Share Your Budget”, which leads him to Screen screen 12 - ; he enters his father’s email, iamyourfather@deathstar.com, and hits share "Share" (Vader ignores this email for a while). Luke Luke quits his app. Periodically Periodically throughout the month he adds his new expenses by signing onto into the app (which brings him from Screens to screens 1->3->4), clicking on “enter income“Enter Income/expense”Expense”, and adding the expense in screen 6 by clicking Expense, selecting the appropriate category, entering the amount, leaving the “Recurring” setting as “Once”, and clicking “Add to Budget”.
When Luke spends too much money at the Cantinalocal cantina, he logs into his MoneyManager app (Screens screens 1->3->4) and selects “Create/Modify Budget”, which leads him to Screen screen 5. He He re-allocates his budget, allocating “Recreation” $70, “Clothing” $55, and “Food” $175. He He then asks his father to give him more money. Vader Vader decides to finally check out his son’s budget before making his decision, so he creates an account (Screens screens 1->2, which lead him to 4). He He then selects "View Shared Budgets, " and clicks on “Luke’s Budget”, which leads him to screen 7. From screen 7 he , Vader navigates around by clicking in a variety of places - he clicks on “Food”, which brings him to Screen screen 8 where he views a detailed list of his son’s spending (he then clicks “Return to Main List” to go back to screen 7.) He He clicks on “Graph”, which shows him Screen screen 9, a more visual view of how much Luke has spent and has left in each of his categories. FinallyFinally, he clicks on "History", which shows him how much his son has spent in the different categories in history over time (since his son Luke has only used the app for one month, this graph would only have a single point for each category and would thus not be very interesting.) Vader Vader decides to give his son an extra $50 this month, and tells him so. Luke logs into his MoneyManager app (Screens screens 1->3->4) and selects “Enter Income/Expense”, where he changes adds $50 as a one time income and credits it to his food category.
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This interface is very learnable, which is particularly good for the parents who might be viewing their children’s budgets. All All of the basic options are located on the home screen, so it’s easy to see all the functionalities of the app (in screen 4). All All of the screens are maximized optimized for viewviewing purposes. There’s There’s little clutter, and the very basic amount of information is displayed before you expand for more detail (in the case of going from screen 7 to screen 8) which means that beginning users wouldn’t won’t be overwhelmed. Most Most of the things in the UI that are meant to be clicked on are clearly clickable and are consistent with other UIs, which again means good learnability.
This UI involves a lot of screen navigation (the path to view another person’s shared budget alone requires you to go from screen 4 to screen 11 to screen 7 to screen 8, which is particularly non-ideal because it’s the path that’s going to be used the most by parents who may not be very experienced using mobile apps). This This makes the UI inefficient; the experienced students also have to go through a long process to enter expenses, which is something they’ll likely be doing often, and they can only enter one expense at a time which slows down the process even further. ThusThus, although the interface is very learnable (good for our new app user group of parents), it’s not efficient, which is bad for our experienced student users.
This design also has a few safety problems. There’s There’s no way to back track backtrack and edit (or delete) an expense - ; although there’s a confirmation message when you enter an expense, this still allows for poor error correction for something that someone might want to be correctable (although lack of correctable correctability has its advantages for protecting against students who might try to fiddle with their expenses after the fact). One One major problem in this model is that the distinction between your budget and a recurring income is not particularly clear, so a user could get confused about what to enter where - the ability to enter income was intended to allow students to keep track of their savings, but in other iterations we decided that this made the model too confusing and that we should focus on budget. We We intend to ask users which they value during user testing.
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